


countdown

by Edgedancer



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Gen, Gender-Neutral Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2018-08-14 11:18:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 38,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8011582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edgedancer/pseuds/Edgedancer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They get caught crawling outside the instructors lounge. Lance just wishes they'd gotten to Pidge first; a flight team should do everything together.</p><p>—</p><p>"There will be no negotiation," Sendak says firmly. "You have forty-eight of your hours to turn over the prisoner and the Voltron Lion or face annihilation."</p><p> </p><p>  <i>(Flight Team Voltron might not do anything together for a while.)</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

They get caught crawling outside of the instructor's lounge. 

Principal Iverson wastes no time in dressing them down. Lance tunes him out– they're not going to be expelled for being out after-hours, no matter what Hunk says. He just wishes they'd gotten to Pidge first; a flight team should do everything together, even get scolded. Then again, Lance isn't missing Pidge's snark or his idiotic outbursts right now– honestly, if the kid wasn't so careful about saluting all the time Lance wouldn't believe he'd been in military school.

They're just about to be told their punishment (probably cleaning duty, which could have been a good bonding exercise too, damn) when there's a burst of chatter on Iverson's radio. 

"A large object has entered the atmosphere and is projected to land near the Garrison, sir!" says a voice over the comm. "The trajectory and size don't fit a meteor, it--" Another voice breaks in. "Sir, radar imaging shows some kind of landing pod, but the ID beacon is not Earth standard!"

Lance's eyes widen. He glances at Hunk, who looks as shocked as Lance feels. Not Earth standard... does that mean–?

Iverson seems to notice the two of them for the first time, and his own slightly shocked expression firms to his usual stoic-ness. Moments later he's striding off while making a basewide lockdown announcement and motioning for Hunk and Lance to be escorted back to their room.

They've made it halfway down the hallway when a deep thud echoes through the base.

***

The next morning, Hunk and Lance stagger to the commissary for breakfast, yawning. They didn't get to sleep for hours after the lockdown, too busy throwing around theories about what had crashed. When the lockdown had ended and the dim emergency lights had gone off, they'd had to change in pitch black, argument halted by their irritated classmates next door. Not that they'd come to any conclusions– the discussion went on as they walked.

"There's no way an alien ship just actually crashed on Earth. That would be way too cool for them to have just left everyone in the dark about," Lance argues. He's being annoyingly skeptical as usual.

"But you heard the tech guy– 'Not Earth standard'?! What else could it mean?"

Lance sighs as he shoves the commissary doors open. "It means that some rich dude decided to build a ship without a license or the proper protocols and it predictably failed on re-entry."

"I wonder where Pidge is," Hunk comments as they get in line. "His dorm is on the southwest side, maybe he saw something."

"I doubt it– the kid never looks up from his computer. I'm just glad Iverson got distracted before he could give us– "

"Cadet Team Seven!" comes a familiar gruff voice over the loudspeaker. "Report to the principal's office immediately."

"Cleaning duty," Lance finishes. They look back at the food longingly, but if six months at the Garrison have taught them anything it's that you don't keep Principal Iverson waiting.

But when the door to the command office opens, it's not Iverson's face that greets them. A tall woman with chestnut hair and a _lot_ of stars on her shoulder is standing in front of his desk. Iverson himself is off to the side, talking to an aide and looking stressed. Several military personnel are milling around the room. The Garrison functions both as a school and a military base, but Hunk is pretty sure at least some of these people are from the fleet proper.

"Where's Gunderson?" the woman demands, brusque and with the hint of an accent. Hunk blinks. 

"Pidge? We haven't seen him, ma'am," he ventures. It's not just the woman's rank that makes her intimidating– the way her eyebrows are drawn together makes it obvious that she's close to snapping.

"Are you telling me you had no knowledge of his activities last night? Principal Iverson tells me the two of you were out of bed as well," she snaps.

As well? "Pidge was out of his dorm last night?" Lance sounds disbelieving, and Hunk agrees. Pidge might have had the odd outburst, but he wasn't the sneaking out type.

The woman eyes them, mouth pinched. Finally, she sighs. "So you don't know. Well, you can go then–"

"General Parisot!" An aide calls. "His file, ma'am." On the back wall, the screen moves to show bios of Pidge.

"General, the Gunderson file appears to be hacked!" the aide calls. 

What?

"When? Can you trace the location, find out where he is?" Parisot spits, rapid fire.

The aide sounds sheepish. "No, ma'am. The file doesn't show any signs of hacking, it's just.."

Iverson finally speaks. "If it doesn't show any signs of hacking, then how do you know it's been hacked?"

"...Pidge Gunderson doesn't exist, sir."

_What?_

"How is that possible?" Iverson barks. "Cadets get background checks and are sent directly from elite military schools. You can't just... show up!"

"No, sir. The checks show up as completed, there's family information and everything there. But it's all fabricated, sir."

Hunk realizes, on consideration, that he knows almost nothing about Pidge. He and Lance had hit it off as soon as they'd met each other on the Garrison aerodock, and being roommates had given them ample time to get to know each other. Pidge showed up for meals and classes and then disappeared back into his room. (He'd been the envy of half the cadets for having his own, and Hunk wonders if that was also the result of hacking.) 

"He must be some kind of plant," Parisot says, turning. "Gunderson was your comms specialist. Can you describe him to me?"

Lance is apparently in such shock he doesn't realize that she's addressing him. Hunk steps in.

"Pidge is... quiet? He keeps to himself a lot, spends most of his time on his computer. He's really nice, uh..."

"He gets upset whenever anyone mentions the Kerberos mission," Lance adds. "Ma'am."

"Kerberos?" Parisot shakes her head. "Of course..."

She regards the two of them for a moment. "Are you sure you have no information about Gunderson's true identity? Has he been acting at all erratically in the last few days?"

"No," Lance and Hunk respond.

"And did you have any evidence of him being in contact with someone outside the Garrison?"

"It's possible," Hunk says. "Like I said, he was never away from a computer for long, he could have been doing anything." There's some kind of firewall preventing Garrison students from contacting the outside world except for regulated phone calls, but apparently Pidge is some kind of genius hacker-slash-spy so Hunk figures he could have broken through that.

Parisot looks thoughtful, then nods. "Yesterday, he and an unidentified accomplice broke into a United Space Fleet facility, stole valuable equipment and research, and kidnapped an unconscious patient out of quarantine."

Hunk isn't sure what they're supposed to think about this, but luckily he's saved by a Garrison tech.

"General, we're being hailed! The signature is similar to that of the landing pod!"

Parisot takes a deep breath and motions Lance and Hunk to a corner of the room, out of the screen view. "Put them through." She pauses. "I need quiet in this room. This could be a first contact situation."

Lance looks like he wants to hide under a desk and take deep breaths for a little while.

But there's no time for that because the screen fuzzes out, and a furry purple face with a bionic eye fills the screen.

(Hunk is equal parts smug and terrified.)

"Humans," the (real! purple! fuzzy-eared!) alien growls. "I am Commander Sendak of the Galra Empire."

Parisot squares her shoulders. (How is she so calm?) "I am General Inge Parisot of the United Space Fleet. I am entitled to negotiate on behalf of the planet Earth, if–"

"There will be no negotiation," Sendak says firmly. Hunk hears one of the aides swear, quietly. "You have forty-eight of your hours to turn over the prisoner and the Voltron Lion or face annihilation."

The screen goes black.

 

_T - 47:59:58_

Pidge stares at Keith and Shiro over the laptop she'd used to hack into the alien signal. Shiro pants quietly, eyes unfocused and pained, and the sound echoes through the cave. Keith's fingers unconsciously trace a lion carving in the floor as he meets her gaze, and Pidge can see her reflection in his wide eyes: she looks lost. She looks terrified.

Sendak's words bounce around in her mind. _Two days_ , she thinks, _until the end of the world._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thoughts?
> 
> (Parisot is pronounced Pah-ree-SO. She's from France– specifically Alsace-Lorraine, hence the German first name.)


	2. Chapter 2

_T - 47:57:16_

In the command office, the noise is deafening. Lance feels nauseous. Hunk has gotten a chair and is motioning for him to sit, looking worried. Lance must look even more unsteady than he feels.

" _Enough!_ " General Parisot finally yells, and the room goes quiet. "Ladies and gentlemen, we are _professionals_."

Everyone goes back to their stations. The aide whose chair Hunk stole hovers awkwardly by his desk.

"Right," Parisot says. "We have two days to either satisfy this Sendak's demands or get rid of him some other way. So we have three priorities: find the patient, find the 'Voltron lion', and learn more about these Galra."

"Ma'am?" A sciencey-looking guy with a nasty bruise on his face speaks up. "The patient was talking about Voltron. He said it was a weapon."

Parisot nods. "Right then. If we find him, we can find this Voltron and decide what to do with it." She looks around at the room and the officers, then starts giving orders. "Randhawa, Taft, I want a report on the Galra ship– size, location, whatever you can find out. Kolmanovsky, Nkechi, contact the United Nations, appraise them of the situation and make sure we can move in whatever country the lion appears in. Tomasello, Cho, look for information on Voltron or a powerful lion– there's no way an alien weapon has gone entirely unnoticed. Gupta, Iverson, cadets, with me."

What does she want Lance and Hunk for? Everyone else springs into motion. The panic from a moment ago seems to have been tucked away– Parisot's gotten everyone thinking about what they can do instead of what might be coming.

"Gupta, pull up the surveillance feed of the intruders. Maybe we can find some hint of where they went," she says to the unseated aide. Lance vacates the chair rather than letting the guy lean over him, even though he's still feeling a bit shaky. On the screen, a figure in red dashes down a hallway, face covered and hair flying.

No way, Lance thinks. The feed switches to a room where the red figure beats up several guards. Lance cannot believe this. "Is that..."

"Takashi Shirogane?" Parisot says. "Yes, he appeared–" On screen, the figure in red pulls down his mask, and no, just–

"No, I mean, yes, but, that's Keith!" Lance cannot _believe_ this. His old rival is kidnapping heroes now? How the mighty have _fallen._

"Wait, really?" Hunk sounds incredulous. Parisot turns to look at them.

"You know the intruder?" Video-Keith is talking to the unconscious Shiro, but it's too quiet for the cameras to pick up. 

Lance scoffs. "Know him? He was my rival in flight school. Keith Kogane."

(Pidge has appeared, talking a mile a minute to Keith as he stuffs equipment into his backpack. The jerk looks confused, but when Pidge takes Shiro's other arm he shakes his head as if to clear it and they leave the room.)

Without even being told, Gupta pulls up Keith's file on his computer. "Best pilot in his class, washed out for assault of a superior officer."

"What exactly did he do?"

"Apparently he only landed three punches before he got pulled off, yelling threats," the aide responds. Lance remembers that day; he'd heard raised voices, and had ended up carrying their dorm supervisor to the infirmary. 

"And where is Keith Kagone now?" Parisot asks.

"He owns a house near the Garrison, and he owns a bike matching the description given by Professor Harris."

Parisot _grins_ , and it's as frightening as the actual alien and twice as wolfish.

Lance may be in love.

 

_T - 47:45:29_

It takes an embarrassingly long time for Keith to notice that Shiro is going into a full-on PTSD flashback, and even longer for he and Pidge to figure out how to pull him out of it.

Even when he's calmed down, Shiro is insistent on one thing: "We can't let them find Voltron."

"Okay," Pidge says soothingly. "We won't."

"...Why?" Keith, asks, earning a glare from Pidge. "Hey, I'm not saying I disagree, but I'd like to know why we're endangering the whole Earth over some alien lion!"

Shiro rubs his eyes, and Keith hopes the drugs the Space Fleet people gave him don't have side effects. Of course, the side effects could also be from the year of torture by aliens.

"The Galra are... monsters," Shiro says haltingly. "They've destroyed worlds– whole systems, even. And Voltron is..." he looks pained. "It's a really powerful weapon."

"A lion?" Pidge asks. "That's what I don't get. How can a _lion_ threaten an intergalactic empire? Is it a codename, like it's called Lion but it's actually some super-dangerous weapon?"

"It's a lion, but not just a lion," Shiro says. "The lions themselves are special somehow, but there's something more to Voltron."

"So there's more than one lion?" Keith jumps on the part he does understand. "Why did Sendak ask for 'the' lion, then?"

Shiro sighs. "I don't know, Keith. My memories aren't working right– it's like trying to put together a puzzle where half the pieces are lost, another quarter are broken and the rest were never there at all."

"Okay," says Pidge. "Let's just work with what we do know. Sendak and the other Galra are evil. They want Voltron, and specifically the lion, both of which are way too powerful to let them have, and anyway we don't know how to get them. They also want Shiro, who's right here. If they don't get them, they'll 'annihilate' us– is that a threat they can carry out? How would they do that, poison the atmosphere?"

"No," Shiro says. "Explode the planet." His face says he's seen it happen.

"Oh," says Pidge, eyes wide. "Well then."

Keith groans in frustration. "We can't give them what they want, but we can't just let them destroy the Earth either..."

Shiro frowns. "Maybe if I give myself up, I can convince them there's no lion here–"

" _No,_ " chorus Keith and Pidge. Keith continues. "They must have figured out the lion was on Earth somehow, and I'm against giving the Galra anything they want."

Shiro hesitates, then nods. "And they might destroy or enslave Earth anyway, since they're here."

"So we have to drive them away without giving them anything." Pidge frowns. "But that General Parisot, from USF... she'll probably want to give them what they ask for– she doesn't know how dangerous it would be to give them Voltron, and even if she's a good person she's military; she won't put Shiro's life ahead of the whole Earth. So we have to keep you away from them."

Pidge looks nervous. Keith doesn't know anything about the boy except that he's from the Garrison, and he wonders why he cares so much about this. 

There's a problem with that plan, anyway. "If there's some way to take out the Galra ship, we'd need the military. They've got the weapons and the space travel."

"We'll have to find a way to contact them," Shiro says. "Pidge, you can hack into their communications, right? If we tell them what we know, they'll work with us."

"Maybe," Pidge responds. "And we can't do it here. The USF isn't as good as you might think. They covered up whatever happened on Kerberos, said it was a pilot error. I don't want them to see this place until we're sure they won't turn over the lion; it's pretty obvious it's around here somewhere," he says, gesturing to the carvings.

"But how would they find this place?" Shiro argues. "We only found it because of--"

"My research," Keith says, feeling cold.

"You think they'll find your house?" Pidge asks, worried.

Inside, Keith is cursing himself. "I took off my mask, they must have facial recognition software and I'm in the military databases from school–"

Pidge yanks his laptop open and starts typing. "Maybe I can get in before they find you, the face recognition stuff is really slow and I've already got a way in..."

(The part of Keith's brain that isn't panicking wonders who Pidge is to know all this, but he can hardly stop trusting him now.)

Pidge curses. "Too late, they've already pulled your file. I can't believe I didn't think to wipe the feed last night, I knew they'd notice me missing anyway and it didn't even occur to me..."

"Alright," says Shiro, standing. "We need to get to that research before them."

Keith frowns. "We can probably get to my house faster than they can, with my bike, but I don't know if we can get away in time, not if we have to take or destroy all the research..."

"I think I have a plan," Pidge says. He's not smiling.

 

_T - 46:02:48_

The Garrison is a whirlwind of activity. The rest of the cadets are being sent home, without explanations, but since Hunk and Lance are already in on everything they were asked to stay and help out. After a whispered conference mostly consisting of "I can't believe this is happening!", they'd agreed.

Apparently, 'help out' meant carrying things, giving messages, and generally a lot of running around. 

Hunk sits down for a breather by a window in the command office. Outside, a squad is loading equipment into an ATV. He sees handcuffs and realizes that this is probably the group going after Pidge. Hunk worries– what if the boy gets hurt? Pidge might not have been who he said he was, but Hunk trusts his instincts, and they're telling him that Pidge is a good person. 

Besides, Lance might swallow Parisot's line about Shiro being kidnapped because he gets irrational whenever Keith is brought up, but Hunk had seen the straps holding the pilot down and the care Pidge and Keith had taken when they picked him up. It had looked more like a rescue than a kidnapping, albeit with more stealing on Pidge's part.

"Yes!" Next to Hunk, the sweet-looking tech with hair in a tight braid down to her knees lets out a shout. Hunk stumbles off the windowsill, shocked, before realizing it was a cry of victory.

"What is it, sergeant?" Parisot has come over. The yell has caught the whole room's attention, and she waves her clipboard at them. "Everyone else, get back to work."

The technician– Ra something?– lifts away her headphones, looking embarrassed. "Sorry ma'am, it's just I've been scouring the system and I found the signal the aliens broadcast on."

She sounds so modest that it takes a moment for Hunk to realize what she's said. Then he gasps.

"It's not as big as it sounds," the woman says. "It's all in their language– the only recognizable word is Voltron."

Parisot frowns. "They must have some kind of translation equipment... Well, good work anyway. See if you can find a way to decipher it." She walks off, and Hunk follows her, curious.

They stop behind a man who's got upwards of a hundred internet tabs open and is rapidly switching between them and a text document, copying sections of articles into it. When Parisot taps him on the shoulder, he takes a moment to type in a few more things before turning.

"Yes, ma'am?" Hunk can tell he's choking down irritation.

"What have you found?"

"Well, lions are such a widespread phenomenon in almost every culture that I don't know if any of it is related. But I would guess that it's on this continent. I'm trying to trace the origin of the myth." He starts to turn back to his computer.

Parisot stops him, sounding exasperated. "Sergeant Cho. What myth?"

"It talks about a giant blue flying lion. It's some kind of rain or snow god, always associated with water."

Parisot sighs. "It's probably not here in the desert then, I suppose. Have you found anything about Voltron?"

The man shakes his head. "Tomasello's working on that." He gestures at the curly-haired man next to him before going back to work.

Tomasello is glaring at his monitor like he's about to put a fist through it. Hunk thinks what's on his screen is some kind of military database, and figures he probably shouldn't be looking at it, but hey. He already knows about the aliens, what's a little more extremely classified information?

Parisot looks at the tech's expression and takes a deep breath. "Do you have any good news, sergeant?"

"Well." Tomasello's voice is surprisingly calm. "Nkechi and Kolmanovsky came through; there's almost definitely no government project called Voltron. I'm going through telecom surveillance records for anything similar at the moment, but..."

"Even if someone somewhere does know something, it'd be near impossible to find it in time," Parisot realizes. She spins away, and strides to the door, then turns back into the room. "Good work, all of you."

Hunk follows her out to where the vehicles are departing. He's a little in awe of her composure; from what he can tell, they've gotten absolutely nowhere, but she still recognizes how hard her people are working. She might be worried but she's calculating with it, and he thinks that there could be much worse people to handle a crisis like this.

Lance goes running by them, carrying an armful of combat gear. Up ahead, Iverson is giving orders to the tactical squad, and when Lance gets there, panting, the principal gestures for them to take the equipment.

Parisot strides up– she's shorter than Lance, Hunk realizes with a start, but she seems to tower over everyone.

"General," Iverson greets her. "I've briefed them on the mission objectives. They should be out in five minutes. Their estimated time of arrival at the farm is 1500 hours."

"Good," she says, before turning to the soldiers. "Go save the world."

Hunk watches as the men get in the ATV and pull away. Their faces are hard, and Hunk wonders if they, like him, are thinking about their families elsewhere on the planet and Sendak's threat of annihilation.

_Pidge_ , he thinks as the vehicle drives off into the desert, _what have you gotten yourself into?_

 

_T - 43:54:12_

Pidge looks up. Was that a motor? She and Shiro lurch into even more frantic motion– they'd had more time than they thought, but it still wasn't really enough.

"This is the United Space Fleet. Come out with your hands up! You will not be harmed if you surrender peacefully."

Shiro takes a deep breath and puts the improvised glove on his right hand. He looks tense, but ready.

Pidge's meets his eyes. She knows he hates this plan even more than she does, but it's the best option they have. Keith had better get this right, she thinks, and then feels guilty; even if he is a stranger, he rescued Shiro as much or more than she did. 

Then again, there's no way Keith isn't thinking the same about her.

"If you do not surrender, we are authorized to use force!"

Shiro counts, just loud enough for her to hear. "Three."

Pidge picks up the round canister from the table and walks to the front of the room.

"Two."

There's the sound of boots crunching up to the door.

"One."

Pidge takes a deep breath. This is going to hurt.

"Go."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More than you know, Pidge.
> 
> Parisot was supposed to have an epic speech to the retrieval squad. Then I realized she's much more businesslike than that. (This way I also don't have to come up with an epic speech. Yet.)
> 
> Questions? Comments? Random thoughts?


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Shiro fights; Lance watches; Keith loves; and Pidge hates.

_T - 43:53:55_

Shiro tosses a chair through the windowpane even as he signals Pidge. He jumps through behind it as he hears the front door open, and barely manages to bring his right arm to the ground outside before a blast of sound and light washes over him. 

There are four soldiers between him and where he needs to be, which means there could have been up to eight up front with Pidge.

Good.

Rather than getting up, Shiro uses his new arm–it's still working, perfect– as a pivot to swing around, sweeping the legs out from under the first soldier. The man is still blinking from Pidge's bomb when he hits the ground. A moment later Shiro has his legs pulled back to propel himself forward.

He gets extra momentum from another shockwave. Shiro can feel the displaced air from Keith's extra explosive wash over his back as the research they couldn't save is buried under the roof. He hopes no one was inside, and then blesses any listening god– not a single bit of shrapnel hits.

Shiro does, though, his weight slamming the second soldier's head into the rocky ground. He leaps up onto his hands, pushing off the dazed man's shoulders into a flip. Showy things like that could get him killed– or they could, if Pidge's EMP hadn't come through, shorting the soldiers' modern DNA-locked safeties.

Shiro lands in a crouch, wondering why he feels stronger than ever. He hasn't seen himself in a mirror but Keith had seemed surprised when the old shirt he'd pulled out for Shiro to wear had been too tight. 

Then a soldier pulls something out and points it at him, and it's like a switch is flipped in Shiro's brain, and when he clenches his fist it glows purple, the tinfoil it's wrapped in sloughing away. 

He lunges and his opponent jerks back, saving his hand but allowing his weapon ( _taser_ , he thinks from far away, and _what am I doing?_ ) to be sheared neatly in half. He's fast but Shiro's faster, dancing around to land a kick in the bend of his knee. He grabs his opponent by the neck with his left hand and shoves him to the ground, hand on his throat and knee in his stomach. Just like that he has the challenger pinned, the shadow of the announcer who'll declare his victory falls over him and it all clicks into place, and with the roar of the crowd growing behind him Champion raises his right arm–

"Shiro!" The shadow above him is replaced with a flailing pile of limbs, and at the same moment he's grabbed from behind by the collar.

He's pulled away and there's a boy with a tangle of auburn hair spasming on the ground in front of him. As Keith yanks him by onto the bike he sees two soldiers run around the house, and then everything's receding as Keith guns the engine, and the plan worked to perfection but Shiro's failed Commander Holt once again.

_T - 41:27:41_

It's five-thirty, long before Lance is used to eating, but a spare moment opens up and he is famished. He grabs Hunk and they head down to the commissary only to find that the kitchen staff, too, have been evacuated by Iverson. Somehow this leads to them making a cartload of sandwiches to bring up to the command office. Lance can't believe their break turned into work, but Parisot thanks them for taking care of it, and he supposes they are in the process of saving the world.

Speaking of which, the squat little man assigned to learning about the Galra ship– Taft– has come up to report. He's shuffling papers around clumsily as he talks, and Lance wonders why Parisot gave such a big job to someone so scatterbrained. Then he listens to what the guy's actually saying.

"The Galra ship appears to be orbiting Mars currently, as you can see here," he says as he proffers a print of some pictures. Are those volcanoes? "But judging from the effects, it arrived just this morning. But it seems to have entered the system a few minutes prior; this is a chart of its positions based on shifts in exolunar tidal activity."

Lance glances at the chart, then does a double take.

"Wait," says Parisot. "This is measured in seconds. It moved from the edge of the solar system to Mars in less than a minute?"

Taft swallows. "Yes."

"So what you're telling me is that we're dealing with a race that has developed faster-than-light travel."

"Yes, ma'am."

Parisot sighs. "Do you have any good news, Mr. Taft?" 

He shifts his feet. "We know now that it's possible?"

That won't be much help if the Earth gets destroyed on Wednesday. Lance wonders for the first time if it's even possible to save the planet.

He knows what Parisot is thinking: they have to find this Voltron lion. There's no other option.

A woman whose name Lance can't remember comes running up to General Parisot. 

"Ma'am!" she exclaims. "The ship is communicating with someone outside the solar system. I can't pick up the incoming signals clearly with the Garrison equipment, but having both sides of the conversation should be helpful for deciphering the language. I need to requisition SETI equipment immediately and I don't have the authority."

"Tell me what you need," Parisot says, walking off with the younger woman. Taft follows.

Hunk and Lance stay behind. Lance watches Hunk chew slowly, frowning out the window.

"What's up, man?" Looking back, it's a bit of a stupid question, but Lance decides to own it, following up with a friendly backslap.

Hunk smiles, but it's the dismissive _sure-Lance-that's-great_ half-smile that means nothing, not the _you're-actually-a-good-friend_ one that Lance was going for or even the _good-morning-Lance_ one that shows up every day without fail. Hunk is worried about something– which isn't really unusual, but this time it's something Hunk doesn't think he can talk to Lance about. And Lance thinks he knows what.

"Thinking about Pidge?"

Hunk nods. "It's just... All of this is so insane, and he's so... I don't know. I just don't want him to get hurt."

He looks forlorn. Lance knows he should be sympathetic, but...

"Pidge seems to know more about what's happening than we do. And it's not like he needs us. He broke into a secure facility almost on his own, and he's all buddy-buddy with Keith of all people."

Okay, maybe Lance is a little bitter. Doesn't make any of this less true.

"He's our teammate, Lance!"

Lance's nails dig into his palms. "Some teammate– he didn't ask us for help. If he were innocent, he would have been able to trust us."

Hunk deflates.

"I know, but... I keep thinking, it's just Pidge, right? We know him. He's a tiny sarcastic genius, but he's harmle--"

"General Parisot!" calls an aide over the comms. The room falls quiet. "The retrieval squad has returned!"

Lance and Hunk glance at each other, then head for the door. Parisot soon overtakes them, and in a few moments she is meeting Principal Iverson in front of the Garrison.

Behind him, the twelve men climb out of the ATV. Several of them are supported by teammates, stumbling as though they've been blinded. One is being kept talking, nursing a head wound, and another has a wrapped hand and bruises forming on his throat. Another has a black eye and a broken nose.

Then there's the small figure in green with messy brown hair. If it weren't for the cuffs on Pidge's wrists, Lance wouldn't believe he'd lost the fight. He's pale and his cheek, arms, and knees are scraped. But he's slouching with a bored look on his face, just like the expression he'd worn every day at the Garrison when he'd casually blown off every attempt at team bonding. The world is ending, and Pidge still looks like he's got something better to do. 

No other prisoners emerge. From the spot he and Hunk have been stopped, well-removed from the vehicle, Lance can see Parisot shake her head. She studies Pidge for a long moment, then suddenly snaps her fingers, turns to Iverson and says something.

The principal whips around to look at Pidge. Lance studies the back of his head, but it reveals nothing. Iverson must respond or do something else interesting, though, because Parisot, looking at him, reaches up to massage the bridge of her nose.

Iverson marches straight up to Pidge and starts yelling, though still not quite loud enough for Lance to hear. The (former) cadet looks surprised for a brief moment before rolling his eyes and responding. Iverson gestures sharply with one hand, apoplectic.

Pidge straightens, straining against the cuffs, and snarls something directly into Iverson's face. Teeth flashing and fury clear in his eyes, Pidge looks anything but harmless, and even the gruff principal jerks back. 

"I don't think we know Pidge at all," Lance says.

_T - 39:47:16_

Desert sunsets have always made Keith feel alive. The sun sets a spark to the clouds on the distant horizon, and suddenly the whole sky is alight in gold and red. Soon enough his veins catch too, filling him with the need to move, run, fly.

He flies now, racing the sun west on his bike– and winning, rounding the craggy rocks before the fire can disappear behind them. His mind races the setting sun as well, turning the problem of how they're going to drive away an alien battleship over and over as he dismounts.

He hasn't found a solution over the hours they spent making sure that no Garrison forces had followed. Part of Keith whispers that it's all time being wasted, that they should just turn themselves in, share information with the United Space Fleet. But he remembers Pidge's mistrust, his own expulsion, Shiro limp on a table. Keith had thought the pilot was dead, that he'd broken into a secure military facility for nothing but a corpse. (He still would have done it.)

Shiro looks a little like a corpse still, pale and stiff. He stares forward, unseeing, apparently not noticing that they've stopped.

"We're here," Keith says. Shiro starts and gets off the bike. "Are you... what happened back there?"

Shiro looks down.

"Was your arm glowing earlier?" What were you going to do to that soldier, Keith doesn't ask, but Shiro seems to hear it anyway because he flinches before responding.

"I remembered something," he responds. "On that ship, they had a gladiator ring. The prisoners fought for their entertainment." Shiro's breath shudders. "I... I killed for their entertainment. I was _good_ at it."

Keith... Keith doesn't know what to do with that. "You–" Shiro flinches again, and all of a sudden Keith doesn't know how he's been ignoring it: this is not the confident, goofy star pilot who had seen an awkward, lost freshman and made him feel like he belonged. This is a a survivor, a refugee. A wreck.

But this is also still Keith's best and only friend, and he refuses to let him be a stranger.

"Shiro," he says. "It's..." He stops. "It will be okay." Slowly, he puts a hand on Shiro's shoulder. It's a familiar gesture from their year in flight school, when they were proud children who nonetheless needed a reminder that someone was there with them. But here, now, it's not enough: the space between them feels like the galaxies from just a few days ago. So Keith, without another thought, throws his arms around Shiro.

It isn't much of a hug; Keith isn't experienced with this. He doesn't know how to compensate for the fact that even now that he's grown to his full height he only comes up to Shiro's nose, the protrusion of Shiro's ribs or the fact that their legs still have to occupy separate spaces. 

But after a few moments of shocked silence, Shiro closes his arms around Keith, so it must have been good enough.

_T - 39:02:49_

Pidge's absolute favorite thing about masquerading as a boy is cargo shorts. She can tell that the soldiers who search her are judging because of the amount of random trash she has in her pockets, but she can fit her _diary_ in those things. No way was she going to pass up the opportunity to not leave cool things behind. She is _never_ going back to girl's pants.

Of course, there's a real possibility that she'll never get the chance, especially if no one ever shows up to question her. Pidge has been sitting here in a room stripped of anything but a bed and chair for half an hour, replaying the glorious look on Iverson's face when she'd reminded him of her promise all those months ago. She hates waiting.

Finding the truth took far more waiting than she had expected. She'd felt as though she were in some kind of race, searching desperately to find her answers before the ruse inevitably fell apart. She had been so frustrated when just a month ago, having hacked into every database she could find, she'd found that the Kerberos files had been printed, filed somewhere across the world, and then wiped from the digital world as efficiently as the script to remove all photographic evidence of Pidge Gunderson that she'd set into motion last night before barging into a quarantined USF pod.

The door opens, and a woman walks in, followed by a guard and Lance of all people. Pidge briefly wonders how the arrogant baby got into all this, but quickly focuses on the woman as she begins speaking.

"You look remarkably like your brother, Miss Holt," she says with the faintest hint of an accent. It's the voice from the broadcast, and Pidge should have known it would be this one who finally broke through the charade.

"Allow me to introduce myself," the woman continues. She has a delicate face, and she smiles a little, friendly. She seems composed, kind.

"No need." Pidge cuts her off. She knows this woman. She knows the voice that made the call that had her father and brother leaping for joy. She knows the smile that accompanied headlines lauding the USF's sponsorship of the greatest scientific expedition since Louis and Clark.

Pidge has spent hours glaring into the digital eyes that first saw the failed mission reports, has cursed the lips that spoke the order to erase Pidge's family and blame it on their trusted friend.

Pidge knows the face of the enemy better than she knows her own, anymore.

"Let's start our interrogation, General Parisot," she says, and she can't hold back a smile.

Pidge is done waiting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! Sorry for the wait, my life has been insane for the last couple of weeks. (It still is a little but I have enough breathing room to post this.)
> 
> I did get the entire outline done, so this fic is (a) definitely going to get finished and (b) going to be FUN. I am so excited, guys.
> 
> Thoughts?


	4. Chapter 4

_T - 39:33:19_

_"What?!"_

Lance tries to piece his mind back together. On the screen of the command center is a dossier for a student named Katie Holt. That was fine. Her brother and father were on the Kerberos mission; so far so good. The picture looks exactly like Pidge. His brain promptly breaks again.

"Pidge is a _what?!"_

"A girl," Hunk says. "I'm sure you've heard of them."

"Yes, Hunk, I–" Lance twitches. Hunk is being way too casual about this... "Did you know about– _this_?" Lance demands, jabbing a finger at Hunk's face.

"No!" Hunk bats Lance's hand away. "But it makes sense, doesn't it?"

"Sense? No, no, NO it does not make sense! Nothing about today makes sense!"

Okay, maybe Lance isn't handling all of this that well, but honestly, who would? You had to be some sort of zen master, or, or–

"So Miss Holt had broken into the Garrison before?"

Or General Inge Parisot. Lance smiles at her, though she's facing Iverson (who looks pretty shocked still).

"Yes," the principal responds. "The last incident was about eight months ago. She was hacking into United Space Fleet files through my personal terminal."

"Why was she not reported missing? Surely her mother did not approve of... this." The woman gestures broadly. Lance wonders if she's met Mrs. Holt, who was after all the wife and mother of two thirds of the USF's most famous mission. Or at least its most infamous.

"Local school records indicate she transferred to an elite boarding school," an aide responds. "They have the mother's signature and everything. But the boarding school has a last minute withdrawal recorded."

"It still doesn't make sense," Hunk says. "So Pidge infiltrated the Garrison to break into the USF systems– but how did she know when Shiro would land?" 

Lance pipes up. "For that matter, how did _Keith_ know? And why would they fight so hard to get away?"  
Parisot stands, still seemingly calm. "We must just ask her and see what she tells us. McClain, come along; I want you in the room since you've interacted before. Garett, look through the journal and see if you can find anything useful."

Lance follows her down to the dorm level, still reeling a little. When they walk in, Pidge looks normal– (maybe he should start calling her Katie?) but the look on his- her- face turns to something far more sinister than the brooding moments Lance has seen before as (s?)he invites the general to begin.

Parisot merely hums. "If you insist, Miss Holt. You are aware that stealing classified information and property is an international crime, as is identity fraud in military contexts?"

Pidge leans back. "Yup. But don't act like you have the moral high ground, _general_ ," she says, shockingly venomous. _What is he-she- talking about?_ Lance wonders.

"I'm not sure what you're implying, Miss Holt," Parisot unconsciously echoes. 

Pidge snorts and continues in the mutinously sarcastic tone with which Lance is way too familiar. "You aren't? Really? So lying to the whole world about the Kerberos mission– about three people's lives– doesn't strike you as at all immoral?"

"Pilot error was the most logical possible conclusion given the information—"

"Liar!" Pidge lunges to her feet and is grabbed by the guard. "You were covering your own—"

"Control yourself, Miss Holt," Parisot hisses. "This isn't productive or relevant to the current issue. We need to know everything possible about Voltron and we need the location of Shirogane."

"So you can turn them over to those monsters, or hide them away along with anything that threatens your power? Not likely," Pidge bites out. 

"Be reasonable. You could give us the key to the fate of the planet."

"I could," agrees Pidge. She turns away stubbornly. "But frankly, I don't trust you with it."

 

_T - 38:48:52_

Shiro hammers the nail into the soft sandstone of the cave opening. Across the tunnel, Keith secures the other end of the tarp, then dusts his hands off on his pants before going over to sit at Pidge's monster of a computer.

In those frantic hours they'd spent packing the bike, Keith had focused on his research and objects of sentimental value. Pidge–Katie– had been piecing together the tech for their escape and the time after, tinkering madly with the bits of the Galra ship she'd apparently stolen while rescuing him. Shiro had been the one to pack food and blankets. It had felt achingly familiar, his two teammates fanatically pursuing their genius while he quietly took care of the practical things.

Shiro's shaken out of his reverie by Keith throwing a rock at the wall with a yell. Kneeling to look, Shiro sighs at the message flashing across the dim screen: CONNECT TO POWER SOURCE OR USE SOLAR CHARGING.

"Well, I guess we'll have to wait until tomorrow morning," Shiro says. He stands and stretches, watching his shadow move along the cave wall. "Let's look at those carvings again, the ones that told you when I was coming."

As he covers the lantern and follows Keith to another cave, Shiro wonders how his life has gotten so strange. He'd signed up for a space exploration program fully prepared– and excited– for aliens. But magic purple prosthetics and ancient prophesies? Not so much.

The desert is entirely different in the night; where the sun turns it into a sea of warm gold, under the moon it doesn't look much different from Kerberos, miles of monochrome mesas and a fine dust blurring the horizon. Shiro can't help but recall the excitement he'd had on landing, and the fear as the sky above opened and swallowed them up. It makes him feel... young.

Here, the sky is quiet, black and full of stars, but Shiro can't quite summon the peace it used to give him. The threat of the Galra's return hangs over his head, too literally. It's with some relief that he replaces that not-empty-enough expanse with the rock ceiling of the cave and uncovers the lamp.

Keith is looking at him. Shiro knows that both of them have changed, that as much as Keith tries to hide it, he's unsettled. So he summons up a smile, the kind that used to come so naturally. It's easier than he thought it would be.

"So what does all this mean?" he asks. It's obvious that the carvings here are different; the ubiquitous lion is less prominent, replaced by a parade of stick figures.

Keith glances at him. "Well, if you look at this part, I think that's you and the rest of your crew leaving for Kerberos."

Three figures, one blacker than the rest as though the grooves have been filled with ink, inside what appears to be a canoe. But the boat is tilted up towards the carved moon and stars.

"And I guess this is you being captured..." Along the top of the wall, the three figures are surrounded by stockier ones with horns. Staring at them, Shiro recalls for a moment robotic voices and inhumanly strong hands on his arms. He shakes himself, tears his eyes away.

"What is this?" Deeper into the cave, four large, human figures take up most of the height of the wall. The first one is surrounded in either bare trees or grasping hands– no, definitely trees, because it's positioned over what seem to be fallen yellow leaves. The next is a person wreathed in blue dots. Shiro can't for the life of him figure out what that's supposed to be, so he moves on to the third one. It's much simpler, a green figure holding a blossom in cupped hands. Finally, there's a sun radiating red over a fourth figure. 

"I think that it's supposed to be seasons passing," Keith says. "Fall, winter, spring, summer." And the blue dots must be raindrops. Shiro feels stupid. Keith continues. "I don't know who the people are– maybe the people who made these had season gods or something?– but I guess the stuff on the top is supposed to be what was happening to you."

In fact, there are another set of scenes scrolling above the seasons. The person in black waves a stick (a sword, Shiro's fractured memory corrects) at several purple horned figures. There's more, too, but Shiro can't make heads or tails of it until the end, when the black figure stands with purple haloed around his hand. He shivers, clenching his fist.

"So how did you know when I was going to show up?" he asks, looking away. Keith goes deeper into the cave– how far does it go?– and Shiro follows.

"Well, I figured the four seasons meant a year since you left. Then there were these–" he gestures at two white circles– "which I think are moons. And then on the third full moon after a year has passed..." A boat, similar to the one at the beginning, points downward at the cave floor, a white circle carefully carved and painted in the corner in the image. 

Shiro traces his fingers along the lines of the ship and breathes carefully– in through his nose, out through his mouth. After a moment, he's surprised to find that his mind isn't frantically spouting objections. Shiro's always been relatively hard to unsettle, but even he should be freaking out a little, right? 

Well, the fact is that he's not, so he might as well accept that as the gift it is. Keith is once again hovering as though he wants to say something but isn't quite sure what, and he looks relieved when Shiro straightens. 

"Is there anything else?" Shiro asks. The tunnel goes on, and he holds the lantern out in front of him. The cave seems to split in two, but one path is blocked by huge rocks.

"That didn't use to be there," Keith frowns at the rocks. "I guess this cave isn't very stable..."

Neither of them suggest leaving. 

The open tunnel's walls are once again covered in lions. In fact, there are even more here than in the first cave, sometimes even seeming to interact with each other. There are many more horned figures here, though a few have smaller horns set much lower on their heads– ears, maybe? 

"I guess this is the future," Shiro says. It was meant to be casual but comes out far too worried. "Any idea what it means?"

Keith frowns. "Well, it looks like the lions are fighting the Galra... This one might be the Earth?"

A green ball is surrounded by star-shaped designs, a purple line connecting them in a circle. It's ominous, like a net. 

It's followed by more lion carvings pouncing on purple ships, and Shiro thinks that that message, at least, is clear. The lion(s?) will guard the earth. Keith and Shiro just need to find it.

 

_T - 36:12:24_

The more Hunk looks through Pidge's diary, the guiltier he feels. Not about looking through it; Hunk understands privacy as an abstract concept, but he can never bring himself to regret getting to know a person better, the way they view themselves. No, Hunk feels guilty because the more he reads, the more he realizes that the kid downstairs does not deserve to be locked in and interrogated like a criminal– or a rebellious child.

First of all, Pidge is a genius. This is another thing that Hunk understood as a concept, but reading through the other cadet's notes, he is in awe. Pidge's ability to hack into basically everything is impressive enough, but Hunk has just enough knowledge of software to grasp that the decryption/translator hybrid Pidge had been working on is going to be revolutionary.

Going to be, because it isn't done. The decryption was so close to completion that the comm tech had been able to finish it (and had given Hunk the tightest hug he'd had in a while when she managed it), but the translator has a ways to go. Hunk has an idea that he thinks could work based on one of York's lectures, but he doesn't have the the knowledge to do it himself in the time they have left, and Randhawa– who had asked him to call her by her first name, Kirit– never heard the joke so she doesn't have the context. Or, with her other tasks, the focus.

That's the other thing that makes this whole experience so uncomfortable: Pidge's diary documents an obsession that's downright unhealthy. Hunk had seen the way Pidge would skip meals, sleep, even homework to disappear alone. Before the Garrison, he'd never seen someone dance so masterfully on the edge of flunking out. Lance, too, was constantly in the danger zone, but for him it was all lazy carelessness and then desperation at the last second, not the calculatedly minimal effort that Pidge put forth. Now, suddenly, Hunk can see the other variable in those calculations, this monster of a project. But more than that, he can see the doodles of Commander Holt in between all the notes, the holes in the page that records the day Pidge got into the USF database and found an erasure and a paper file reference, the way the writing gets steadily more frantic as time passes. 

Hunk can see that this whole affair isn't a child's naivety or rebellion. This is the denial stage of grief suddenly given a leg to stand on. 

And the thing is, if the USF had just been open about what had really happened to the Kerberos mission, Pidge would still have been scouring the universe for their family. But instead of spending months fighting their way into the databases and hacking together equipment, they could have gotten started on the real work at the very beginning. If they hadn't had to hide everything they were doing and keep their grades up, Pidge would have finished the translator at least a month ago, probably more.

It's the USF's own fault that Earth is so unprepared for this mess, Hunk realizes. He was watching the feed along with half the room while Pidge was interviewed. Pidge doesn't hold the key to saving the Earth– they could have been the key.

"Excuse me, uh... Hunk, right?" Kirit has removed her earphones and is looking at him.

"Yeah, that's me," he responds. "Did you need me to get you something?" Technically he's been promoted from general helper to diary decoder, but he knows that the general doesn't think the book is that important, or she would have put someone else on it.

Kirit smiles timidly. "No, I just wanted another set of ears," she says, holding out her headset. 

Hunk puts them on. At first he hears nothing, but then Kirit hits the spacebar and he's bombarded with a short rush of static. A voice breaks through, quick and deep with a growling undertone that doesn't sound human.

"I don't understand any of this," Hunk tells Kirit. Well, actually that's not true. "Except 'Voltron'." The word is enunciated in a way that Hunk recognizes from hearing his own name in Lance's calls to his parents, the way that means it is entirely foreign to the language.

"Just keep listening."

He does. He opens his mouth as the message cuts to static, but Kirit waves a hand at him. He listens to a few more messages, growing increasingly confused, before hearing something– not in the growling alien speech, but in the static directly after. Most of it is just random noise, but after a while he realizes that the first minute seems different, moving up and down in pitch the same way every time.

"Do you hear it?" Kirit asks. She looks nervous, and Hunk understands. If she hadn't also heard it, he might have dismissed it as paranoia.

"The static," he confirms. "It's like there's something else there."

Kirit smiles. "That's what I thought!" she chirps. "I think there's another layer of encryption there, one specifically designed to make it sound like normal static. Someone is piggybacking on the signal."

"So we just have to find a way to decrypt that," Hunk says. He can see Kirit's excitement fading along with his own. "Within, what, thirty hours? Thirty-five? No pressure or anything."

As she returns to her computer, face grim, Hunk puts Pidge's diary down– maybe the other cadet has some notes on this? He'll have to check– and gets up to make more coffee.

It's going to be a long night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yay, day one over! Just for context, Sendak's ultimatum was given at about 11 in the morning, and as of this chapter it's like midnight. There's a bit of a time skip between this chapter and the next.
> 
> If you're wondering-- yes, that other tunnel does predict canon.
> 
> Kirit is of Indian (probably Punjabi or Sikh) descent, but she grew up in England.
> 
> Happy New Year!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hover over French for translations (but honestly it isn't anything remotely interesting).

_T - 31:44:13_

The phone rings just before four in the morning.

Lance is no stranger to all-nighters; at this point, his mind has pushed through the muzzy witching-hour fatigue into almost painful clarity. So when the shrill sound fills the room, he's quick to react. 

He picks up the phone, hesitates for a moment, then says, "Galaxy Garrison Headquarters, Cadet La-" 

"Cadet? Why is a cadet answering the phone?" interrupts the man on the other end of the phone. "This is Kais Riahi from the UN science commission. I need to speak to a General Parisot immediately!"

Lance peeks at Parisot, who looks busy. "The Garrison is in an... emergency right now, so unless this is crucial I can take a message..."

"Emergency!" Lance yanks the phone away from his ear. "Well I have also an emergency or I would not call you now! Put the general on and it could be our emergencies will solve each other!"

Lance hands the phone to the General, who, like most of the room, has turned toward him.

"General Inge Parisot. I am extremely busy– Oui, je parle français–Oui, c'est– Quoi?"

Her face tightens, and she strides over to where the comm tech and the crazy astrogeologist(?)- Taft- are working, phone pressed to her ear.

"Oui, nous savons, est-ce que c'est tout–" She taps Taft on the shoulder. "Je vous donne mon spécialiste, il ne parle qu'anglais," she continues sternly, handing Taft the phone.

"Yes," Taft says distractedly. "Yes, the volcanoes– No? No, I haven't looked at the Kuiper belt in the last few hours..." He moves some things around on his screen, then straightens suddenly. 

Lance catches his breath. The Kuiper belt is at the edge of the solar system...

"Yes!" Taft is excited at least. "Yes, I see it! You say you've gotten calls? Did any of the planetary satellites get pictures?" Then he's suddenly beaming, clicking rapidly through toward his email.

Parisot leans over. "I want those on the main screens," she says.

A spaceship fills the screen, Saturn clearly identifiable behind it.

It would be misleading to say the room was silent: first of all, it already had been, all the techs having either taken a sleep shift or settled into individual work; and second of all, Taft was still speaking into the phone. But a different sort of quiet had filled the room, the same dumbstruck, heavy kind that had settled when they'd seen an alien face on the screen.

For one, wild shining moment, Lance thinks, _Maybe they left..._

But Taft crushes that hope before it can blossom. "Another one! And by these readings, it's bigger, too..."

 

_T - 29:57:10_

Keith wasn't aware of the moment he woke; somehow, the transition from sleep to reality was as smooth and gradual as the light slowly creeping into the cave, the monochrome gray of night fading into the soft saffron of sun on sandstone.

He becomes aware of the sound of Shiro's snoring, of the fact that his own breathing has slowed to match. Keith wonders what it says about him that he feels more at home in a cave with the world crashing down around their ears than he had in his warm house, safe. 

He does worry for Pidge, though. Keith had been surprised when the cadet had burst into the room where Shiro was being held, but he hadn't had time to question it. He'd honestly just been grateful for the help. But as Pidge had outlined his not-quite-suicidal plan, Keith had realized with a start that the other boy was moved by the same sort of desperation that had possessed Keith for the year after Shiro had disappeared. Having finally, gloriously, gotten his own family back, Keith felt an odd surge of protectiveness for the younger(? Pidge seemed younger, but he attended the Garrison...) cadet.

Abruptly feeling less peaceful, Keith sits upright. He decides not to wake Shiro yet, putting Pidge's computer out to charge before setting off for the nearest water.

On his way back, he wonders where exactly the stream goes; he's been exploring this area for a good few months and while there's a few smaller creeks leading into it, this stream disappears beneath an overhang too low to squeeze under and never rematerializes. It must end up underground.

Keith looks at the ground suspiciously. Great, now he's going to be waiting for the earth to collapse under his feet on top of everything else he has to worry about.

He returns to the cave to find Shiro awake and eating a breakfast bar. Keith catches the one that's tossed to him and, after receiving a pointed glare, rips it open. He hates these.  
"So," Shiro begins. "Katie's computer is charging, right?"

"Who?" Keith asks.

"Matt's sister," Shiro responds, looking lost for a moment. "She was calling herself Pidge?"

Keith mentally recalls Matt Holt, considers. Many things make more sense now. "Right. Yeah, it should be working now." 

"She said she had both the Garrison and Galra frequencies, right? We should listen, see if we can come up with some sort of plan."

Keith nods. There's a brief dance as they walk over to the computer before Keith sits down in front of it. He uses the string of numbers Pidge had given him to log in, finds the program listening in on USF communications and opens it.

He starts at the burst of static, far too loud, and stabs at the volume button; his right hand collides with Shiro's, and the prosthetic feels cool and strange. Keith doesn't say anything as Shiro pulls away, just presses the button a few times before a voice rings out from the speakers.

"This is Security Officer Nkechi, requesting that all telescopes and other space-imaging equipment of class-C or higher quality be redirected to monitor the two extrasolar vessels and collect as much data as possible, and that it be directed here. Ensure that this news does not reach the public; put the facilities on lockdown if necessary."

Keith's eyes slide to Shiro's face, and he speaks over the affirmative response. "Two vessels?" 

Shiro is pale, fingers tapping steadily as though he's counting time. "They must have sent another ship. Voltron is... important." He makes a frustrated noise, somewhere between a sigh and a groan. "I can tell that I know more about this, but it's just out of reach."

Keith frowns. "Well, I doubt the USF knows anything, or that they're going to trigger anything in your memory." Shiro grunts in agreement. "We're going to need their resources to find Voltron, though. I think there might be underground caves here, but we can't go digging on our own."

Shiro looks down at the ground. "We can't let them give it up, though."

"More importantly," Keith affirms, "we can't let them give you up. We're going to have to give them some solid reason not to, though."

Shiro's mouth twists into a humorless smile. "We have to listen to the Galra communications, I guess." His fingers keep tapping; he's never had that nervous tic before, and a small part of Keith mourns for the Shiro that once was. At least he has the opportunity to learn the one that is.

"Alright then." Keith closes the Garrison window, opens another executable file.

A stream of gibberish pours out. Predictable; he doesn't speak alien, and they have no reason to speak English any other Earth language. Except...

"Wait," he says. "I could understand Sendak, before. Why does it sound like this now?"

"Like what?" Shiro asks. "You can't understand it?"

"No. They must have some sort of universal translation software," he reasons. It's been a year, Keith realizes. Shiro has had time to learn the language.

Shiro shakes his head. "Not software. The others said it's like a chemical, in the air; it lets you make yourself understood, if you try."

Keith stops himself from asking what others– _I killed for their entertainment_ , Shiro had said, and Keith wanted to bring back Shiro's memories, but not like that. "Repeat what they're saying, and I'll write it down," he suggests, opening a text file.

Shiro closes his eyes. A voice begins speaking, and Shiro's follows a moment behind. "This is Lieutenant Zebnot from GS0165-D requesting docking procedures with GS4297-A." A pause as someone else begins speaking. "GS0165-D, you are cleared for docking."

Keith breaks in. "This is useless." He scans the screen, wondering how Pidge made something so complicated to interface with a language she couldn't even understand. 

A new button opens up, and he clicks on it. A new voice, much raspier and higher with odd hissing undertones, issues from the speaker. Shiro shudders, then begins translating again before Keith can voice a concern.

"Sendak," he says, and Keith isn't sure if the disgust in Shiro's voice is his own or a reflection of the original speaker's. "You are sure this miserable speck is the correct planet?"

Another voice, one that's intimately familiar to Keith even though he'd heard it just once, responds. "Yes, druid. The light emissions contain those of Voltron, and this is the only inhabited planet in the system."

"I hope you're right," the other responds. "It was an inconvenience to move everything from Colmar at the last moment. If the lion isn't there to make this worthwhile, Lo–"

Shiro breaks off, choking. Keith puts a hand on his shoulder, but Shiro flinches away even as he finishes the sentence. "Lord Zarkon and Haggar will be extremely displeased."

 

_T - 29:08:54_

Hunk takes a deep breath and opens the door. Pidge has finally been judged harmless enough for a cadet to be in the same room with alone. Hunk wonders what took so long.

Pidge perks up as he comes in. "Hunk!" Then their eyes flick to the camera in the corner, and they sag. "Are you allowed to be in here?"

"Yeah, we're good." Hunk sits on the lone chair; his knees are weirdly close to Pidge's but scooting backward would be awkward so he doesn't. "How are you doing?" A terrible thought strikes him. "They're feeding you and stuff, right?"

Pidge snorts. "Of course. I'm a teenager, they're not going to starve me for information."

That's right, Pidge is a few years younger than them. Hunk is becoming increasingly familiar with the sensation of disgust creeping up his throat; however humanely Pidge is being treated, this whole thing just feels wrong. 

"That's good," he says. "Well, if there's anything you need, I'm your guy."

Pidge looks at him, mouth quirked. "I mean, a computer would be nice. Or a key."

Hunk laughs hesitantly, then trails off as Pidge's eyes seem to shutter. "Sorry, I-"

"Don't." Pidge's not-smile returns. "You didn't come here just to talk, did you?"

Gratefully, Hunk jumps on the change of subject. "No, actually." He pulls out Pidge's diary and opens it up to a dog-eared page, already feeling himself perk up because why worry about depressing stuff like imprisonment when there's science to be discussed? "So we– that's me and this comm tech, Kirit, you'd get along– were able to finish the decryption program, which was awesome, by the way, you're a genius! But anyway we finished it, and Kirit's working on the translation part, though I don't think she'll be able to finish that in time to help. You might, though, if you could get them to let you work on it. Anyway, that's not what I'm here to talk about, really. I was looking through the stuff you thought was numbers– Kirit agrees, by the way– and they come in pairs, right, so I thought they might be coordinates or something at first–"

He glances up to confirm that Pidge is following and flinches. Pidge is glaring at him, but underneath it they look hurt. Hunk hesitates. "Did you not want me to fold the pages? I know some people hate that–"

"No," Pidge hisses. Then blinks. "Well, actually yeah I'd prefer you didn't do that. But," they continue before Hunk can apologize, "that's not the point. I just can't believe you thought I would be so easy."

"What?"

"I'm not stupid just because I'm a child, Hunk."

"Wh- I never said you were!" Hunk is beyond confused. "I said you were a genius, actually!"

Pidge looks at him, and their gaze seems to soften. "No, I guess _you_ didn't. But Hunk, why do you think they let you in?"

"So we could talk about your diary." Hunk thinks this is relatively obvious. 

But Pidge shakes their head, sounding tired. "If they actually respected me scientifically, they'd send an adult. Like that Kirit you were talking about. Hunk, they sent you because we're friends and they thought I'd talk to you. You're the good cop."

At least Pidge thinks they're friends, Hunk thinks. Then he sighs.

"Well, maybe you _should_ talk to me. These Galra will destroy the Earth if we don't give them what they want–"

Just like that, Pidge is angry again. "D'you think I don't know that? I'm not some stupid kid being stubborn because I didn't get my way!"

"I don't think you are!" Hunk snaps.

"Then stop treating me like one! From the second you walked in, you've been thinking: poor Katie, locked up like a prisoner, I have to save her! Did it ever occur to you that I'm doing this for a reason?"

Hunk gapes. Is that what he's been thinking? Sure, he's been worried about Pidge, but...

Wait.

"Do you... Should I be calling you Katie? I should, shouldn't I, that's your name–"

"No." Hunk blinks at the abrupt response, and Pidge flushes a little. "I mean, I really don't mind either way. I think I've gotten used to being Pidge."

And to being treated like Pidge, Hunk realizes.

"Okay," he says. "Pidge." 

The thing is, Hunk does respect Pidge, scientifically and otherwise. But even if whatever Pidge knows means staying in this cell is the best plan, Hunk has information that they don't.

He leans forward so that his body is between the camera and the diary.

"I want to trust your judgement," he continues, catching Pidge's eyes and turning the page, "but that's hard when I don't have the whole story."

He lets his finger fall on one of the Fraunhofer lines he's graphed, the only one that he can't identify. Pidge's eyes widen.

Hunk leans back, casually riffling the pages. "Well, if you're sure you can't tell me anything, I'll go. Though I don't think they'd even notice I was gone," he muses as he stands up. "Everything's been kind of crazy since another ship showed up."

Pidge makes some sort of noise, and Hunk turns at the door, smiles. "We are friends, Pidge. I'm here for you if you need me."

He opens his arms.

Pidge jumps into the hug; Hunk holds them tightly enough that their feet stay off the ground, and their mouth stays next to his ear. 

After a few moments, he puts Pidge down.

"I'm going to go help save the world," he says. "Come out when you're ready."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thoughts? Predictions? Comment below, or scream at me on [tumblr](http://radiantmists.tumblr.com).
> 
> Regarding Pidge's pronouns: I headcanon that, like me, Pidge just doesn't give a crap what pronouns people use. So Hunk continues to use they in respect of Pidge's not-really-binary gender, while most others will use she. Really they should all ask, but most of them assume they already know what they're doing.


	6. Chapter 6

_T - 28:46:34_

Pidge's stomach twists when the door opens.

It's been a while since Hunk left; she doesn't have a clock, but if she had to guess, she'd say it's been at least an hour. Of course, it might just seem longer because she's spent the whole time worrying.

One alien ship had been threatening enough, but the arrival of another has driven home what Pidge should have already realized; whatever Voltron was, the Galra really wanted it, and they wouldn't leave the Earth alone until they had it.

It's something of a wake-up call; though she still refuses to let Shiro or Voltron be handed over if she can help it, Pidge is forced to acknowledge that she's going to have to change her approach. Whatever her personal feelings are, humanity has to work together if they want to survive.

By the time Parisot and Lance enter her room, she's twitchy with concern. She has to talk to them, but how much can she trust them with?

"Morning, Miss Holt," Parisot greets.

"General," Pidge acknowledges. She turns her head. "Hello, Lance."

He glares at her. Well, let him sulk then.

Parisot continues when he doesn't respond. "I'm told Cadet Garett told you about our newest visitors."

"Yeah," Pidge responds.

"Then I hope you see that it's vital we find the 'Voltron lion' as soon as possible," Parisot says. "Any information you have could be vital."

Pidge bites back her first response, and her second. She takes a deep breath and speaks as evenly as possible. "I won't help you find Voltron if you're just going to hand it over."

Parisot frowns. "Your mistrust of me and the FSU aside, these Galra are clearly quite powerful. Can't you see the benefits of having a peaceful first contact interaction?"

"Peaceful? They threatened to destroy the Earth!"

"Yes," Parisot says, "but if they were so willing to destroy everyone, they could have simply conquered us. The fact that they bothered to give the ultimatum means we have a chance."

"And have they given you any promises about leaving the Earth alone?" Pidge smirks at the downward twist of Parisot's mouth; it's as good as a denial. "What's to say they won't just destroy the planet anyway? Or enslave humanity, or something?"

"You have no reason to think they would do that."

Pidge gapes. "What do you mean, no reason? They kidnapped and tortured Shiro, and maybe the whole Kerberos mission!"

Lance flinches at the word 'torture'. Good. At least someone here has a heart.

Parisot just frowns harder. "What makes you think he's been tortured? He arrived in one of their ships, and they clearly built a very advanced prosthetic for them. That doesn't seem like the treatment of a prisoner."

Pidge recalls Shiro's panic at Sendak's voice, or the desperate wildness in Shiro's eyes as he'd fought his way out of Keith's cabin. "They definitely did something to him."

Parisot sighs. "And I'm supposed to just trust your word, no?" 

Pidge doesn't respond. Parisot nods, looking thoughtful, and tired.

After a moment, she leans forward. "At the very least, you can tell me this, if you know: what is Voltron?"

Pidge looks her in the eyes. "Dangerous."

Parisot nods. 

Suddenly, the door opens. A guard pokes his head in and says, "General, Sergeant Cho says he found something, and that you'd want to know right away."

The general rises quickly, then turns back and takes something from her pocket, placing it on the chair. "When you have solid information we can act on, call the office."

She strides out. Lance follows her to the door, turns back, opens his mouth. Pidge waits.

"Bye, Pidge," he says finally, and is gone.

That's helpful. Pidge refuses to look at the pager, slumping back on the bed instead.

She thinks back to the few seconds she'd had to whisper in Hunk's ear, and hopes he makes the right decision.

She wishes she even knew what that was, anymore.

 

_T - 28:27:08_

If Lance hadn't had long legs, he wouldn't have been able to keep up with Parisot as they made their way up to the command center.

As it is, by the time the doors swish open in front of them, he's breathing heavily. The general isn't winded, and though they ran all the way up here, not a hair strays from her neatly-pinned bun. His mind is still reeling from their conversation with Pidge, and he's lost all sense of direction, but Parisot seems to scan the room less to get her bearings and more to check on everyone else.

She strides forward, stopping before the man who'd been researching blue lion legends. 

"What did you find?" she asks.

Cho turns to look at her. "There's a story of a water god falling from the sky," he says. "It matches the mythology surrounding the blue lion, and from what I can tell it originated in this desert."

Lance can't see the general's expression, but her tone sounds exasperated. "This desert is enormous, Sergeant."

"Yes, I know," he grumbles. "But there's another part of the legend we're going to use to narrow it down."

"Continue," Parisot prods.

"Apparently, when the god fell, it broke through the ground and was trapped under the earth, where there was no water. So it pulled a river through the rock."

"So you're going to look for caves in this desert, especially ones that have rivers nearby," Parisot guesses.

Cho grunts affirmatively. Lance studies the bags under his eyes and feels a deep sense of pity; this man is obviously not used to functioning without sleep. "I have a program set to flag likely sites. But with just my computer, it will take at least twenty-four hours."

Parisot nods. "Randhawa!"

The young communications specialist makes her way over.

"Can you divert the spare computers in this complex to run Cho's program?"

"Yes, ma'am," Randhawa answers, sitting down at Cho's terminal.

Lance can already feel himself sagging in relief. They're going to find Voltron, and everything will be fine. 

_What's to say they won't just destroy the planet anyway? Or enslave humanity, or something?_

Lance shoves Pidge's words out of his mind. This has to be the right decision, because it's the only one they have.

 

_T - 27:35:59_

Hunk hands Kirit a cup of coffee. Her eyes don't leave her screen even as she brings the mug to her lips, saying something in a language Hunk can't decipher.

"You're welcome," he says. She doesn't respond.

Next to her, Cho is slumped over his desk, fast asleep. Hunk has been bringing him decaf for the last hour.

As he sets down another coffeecup, Hunk casually picks up Cho's tablet and wanders over to the window. It's midmorning, but heat is already radiating from the glass pane. A lot of the other cadets had hated the constant heat of the desert, but for Hunk it made him feel at home, comfortable and safe, even if it was much less humid than he was used to.

It's a comfort even now, so he sits on the sill with his back to the glass, taking a deep breath. He opens the tablet. Cho's search is about to finish, and Hunk hurriedly mutes the alarm. There are fifteen possible sites flagged.

 _There's a rock formation_ , Pidge had said.

It takes him about a minute of refining search parameters to find the rock formation; there's a note in the Garrison geological survey marking it as a possible holy site for native peoples and barring development there. It's been left alone ever since.

_It has these carvings of lions, and of... other things._

Hunk pulls out Pidge's diary, carefully copies the map and the route he'll need to get there. Then, squashing his feelings of guilt, Hunk erases the search results.

After casually putting the tablet back, Hunk walks by Kirit's desk again. She's had about half the coffee; the rest sits next to her computer, apparently forgotten. 

She's a genius, too; it's been just over twelve hours, and she's already made incredible strides understanding Pidge's translation program. Hunk knows how hard it can be to understand someone else's code, and he's had the advantage of the original author as a reference, plus a lot more sleep.

But Kirit still hasn't been able to add anything to the program; she's undoubtedly close to a breakthrough, but in this sort of revolutionary work 'close' could mean anything from a few minutes to a few months.

_The Galra are evil. But really powerful._

This won't be enough.

Hunk walks by the next scientist– Taft. His monitor is covered in images of the Galra ships. He's calculating size, speed, anything that he can. Next to him, someone is trying to identify subsystems: they think they've found engines, some kind of cannon. How the engines work, what the cannons shoot, is a mystery. 

There's a man on the phone.

"Listen, Mr. President, we know you have nuclear weapons on your moon base. It's no use denying it. We need to commandeer them. Yes, I understand that that's unusual. No, sir, of course, they won't be fired on the planet. There's a representative who's been sent to brief you, he should be arriving by helicopter in the next half hour, but-"

The doors close behind Hunk, cutting off the sound of a soldier attempting to navigate bureaucracy.

The advent of the United Space Fleet had been one of the final symptoms of a relatively stable world peace that allowed students, engineers, pilots, astronauts and soldiers from all over the globe to work together.

People are incredibly hopeful, nowadays. Science programs are being funded, and the benefits are obvious. Even backlash from the failed Kerberos mission is barely a drop in the bucket of public opinion. That might be because of the USF pinning it on pilot error, but Hunk thinks it's at least as much due to all the other strides being made: diseases were being cured all the time, hoverbikes had become relatively common, the world literacy rate had reached 95%.

Weapons research had been the last thing on anyone's mind. Earth was on its way to utopia, and who needed killing machines in a perfect world?

_They've destroyed worlds before._

Hunk enters their room just as Lance is leaving. The place is split carefully down the middle; Lance isn't quite a neat freak, but like most people he takes issue with the way everything Hunk touches ends up covered in machine oil.

Reaching under the bed, Hunk retrieves the large rucksack he carries on hiking trips. It's still packed with his extra toothbrush and other essentials; he leaves it on the bed and turns to his desk.

Hunk is his own sort of genius. Everyone at the Garrison is exceptional, and Hunk, like Lance and Pidge, is at the bottom of his class. But that has less to do with actual ability and more with anxiety: most of the time, when he's not being tested, working with machines feels like a conversation with his grandfather, not always completely straightforward but never too hard to understand.

When the Voltron radiation detector is done, he checks his watch and is surprised to find that the whole thing took him less than an hour. So he carefully wraps it and places it at the top of his bag.

As he winds his way down to the lower levels of the Garrison, Hunk feels like, for the first time in the last day, he can see the halls of the place he's inhabited home for the last few months. It's less imposing than it had been when he walked into orientation as a scared freshman. Now, instead of faceless soldiers and the threat of failing out, he associates this place with Lance's smiles and Professor Montgomery's jokes and the memorable time that Pidge had come out of isolation to put a decisive end to the first-year's prank war. 

The people he passes feel less all-powerful, now; perhaps it's a symptom of how tired they all look, or maybe Hunk's simply getting older, growing wiser.

_Giving in won't save humanity._

Hunk's first memory is a lullaby. 

Not a gentle melody as he's tucked into his soft bed, though there had been plenty of those. No, Hunk's lullaby had been his mother's work song, punctuated by the turning of her wrench as he fell asleep in the driver's seat of the car she was repairing.

He's been driving since his feet could reach the pedals– and Hunk has always been tall. But even before that he'd known cars, had understood how to drive a stickshift before he learned long division, known how to hotwire before he was allowed to walk to the store alone.

Hunk has never driven an ATV before, has certainly never been under the hood of one. But it's still a conversation, and cars all speak the same language, even if this one has an odd accent. It's not too much trouble to find what's out of place: the tracking device. The keys are on the dashboard; no one can just walk into the Garrison, after all.

A few soldiers nod at him as he drives out, assuming he must have some errand; Hunk is still in the cadet uniform, after all.

Somewhere, Mom is wiping her forehead and only managing to spread the grease around. Mama is laughing and handing her a cloth. They, and everyone like them, are counting on Hunk, Lance, Parisot, these soldiers to protect them. 

Hunk can see the fear in the soldier's eyes, because they know they won't be enough.

_But Voltron can defend us._

_Find it._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm planning to go for weekly Sunday updates as we get to the fun parts, so...
> 
> Buckle up. ;)


	7. Chapter 7

_T - 25:32:06_

They've been listening to the radio for several hours when Shiro tenses. He can't tell why at first– they're listening to the Garrison right now, so it isn't one of the crawlingly-familiar Galra voices– but after a moment, he realizes there's a sound coming from outside the cave.

He hurriedly mutes the computer, making a cutting motion when Keith opens his mouth in confusion.

A faint mechanical beeping echoes through the rocks.

They both rise at the same moment. Shiro considers telling Keith to stay behind, but Keith tilts his chin defiantly as though he can hear Shiro's thoughts, and they really don't have time for a charades-argument right now, so Shiro just strides to the cave entrance and gestures for Keith to follow.

He sidles carefully through the flap; the sound seems to be coming from relatively far away, but the echoes make it hard to be sure.

Eventually, Shiro hears footsteps and heavy breathing accompanying the sound. When he turns around, Keith points at him, points at the ground, points at himself, makes a circling motion, and points at another cave entrance, then pads off silently in the opposite direction.

Great.

Shiro listens to the person on the other side of the rock. Judging by the footsteps, they're pretty heavy, wearing a lot of gear, or both. The beeping, Shiro realizes, isn't quite regular; it speeds up and slows down, the footsteps changing direction in response. Shiro realizes it must be some kind of detector even as the footsteps come closer and the beeping speeds to match his heartrate.

He slides around the rock and sees Keith cautiously edging toward the end of the cave across from him, holding what looks like a dagger.

A moment later, the person walks into Shiro's line of sight. Shiro feels a small burst of satisfaction at noticing that he was right: the man is heavyset, but he's also carrying a large backpack and a clunky apparatus with what looks like a radio dish attached to the end and holding some sort of box that's the origin of the beeping. He's wearing a USF uniform, though from behind Shiro can't tell what rank.

The man turns as his machine's beeping increases; Keith presses himself against the wall, but it's a temporary solution as the man approaches the entrance of the cave.

Shiro steps out silently, mentally thanking the smooth floor of the canyon. The beeping quickens, and the man starts to walk faster, and Shiro can't see Keith anymore but the man must be close now, and his right fist clenches and starts to glow purple–

He grabs the man by the shoulder and yanks, pressing him against the rock wall. His right arm comes up to the man's throat. "Don't move."

"Ah! Pleasedon'thurtme!" The... cadet, Shiro can now tell, raises his arms, palms open, letting his machine dangle from its cord, beeping frantically.

Shiro sees Keith walk up out of the corner of his eye. "Who are you? Why did the Garrison send you here?"

"They didn't!" the cadet protests, and Shiro is about to growl _Don't lie_ when he adds, "Pidge did!"

"Pidge?" Keith said, disbelieving.

"Oh, uh, you might know them as Katie? It's hard to break the habit after six months of calling them Pidge..."

"No," Shiro cuts off, "he meant why would Pidge send you?"

"Right!" The boy seems to brighten. "Well, I was looking at their data and I realized that some of the numbers were in pairs, which at first I thought could be coordinates, but they didn't correspond well to any sort of global model or starmap, and anyway there were a bunch. But I had graphed them, and suddenly I thought–"

"Get to the point," Keith snaps.

"Of course, right," the boy says, swallowing and glancing down at Shiro's arm. "This is a Voltron detector."

The machine continues to beep rapidly. Shiro eyes it.

"I'm Hunk, by the way," the cadet says. He hesitates for a moment, then adds, "Are we good? My arms are getting tired." He wiggles his fingers for emphasis.

Shiro steps away from him. Finally, he asks, "Are you sure you weren't followed?"

Hunk nods. "Yeah, they're kind of in an uproar at the Garrison; it'll probably be a while before anyone even notices I'm gone." Keith opens his mouth. "Also, I disabled the GPS on the ATV."

Hunk picks up the machine from where it's pointing at the ground. The beeping slows.

He points it back down. The beeping quickens.

They all stare at the rock. It looks very solid.

"Do you guys have any explosives left?" Hunk asks. "From the house thing?"

"No," Shiro says. Keith makes a noise. "Wait, we do? Why did you have so much?"

"I don't know!" Keith defends even as he starts heading for their cave. "I don't even know if it'll be enough!"

"Why did you even pack it?" Shiro knows Keith is a bit of a pyromaniac, but...

"I don't know! I thought it might be useful!"

"Well, you weren't wrong," Hunk points out, sounding a bit too excited. Shiro's estimation of his common sense drops a few notches from "slightly distracted engineer" down to "occasional mad scientist."

He takes a moment to lament the fact that he knows several of those.

"Yeah," Keith says, vindicated. "And anyway I couldn't leave it behind, it would have gotten set off by the rest and killed someone."

 _That's a fair point_ , Shiro supposes, sighing. Then, "Wait. Killed someone? How strong is this stuff? The other ones barely took out the house supports, they were nowhere close to killing anyone!"

Keith's voice is muffled for a moment as he enters the cave; Shiro holds the flap open for Hunk. "It's not that bad, I was exaggerating a little—"

"Is that Pidge's computer?" Hunk strides over to it, fiddles with the keyboard. There's a rush of static.

"–the most likely site," says the voice of General Parisot. "Have two units ready to leave with us in ten minutes, and a sci-comms crew on standby for the all-clear. We've been delayed too long already; when we find Garett, he'll be in a cell so fast it'll make his head spin. Cho, read them your coordinates."

A man's voice reads a string of numbers.

No one has to tell Shiro that that's their exact location; it's written all over their faces.

  
_T - 24:18:23_

Lance slides off the ATV. He considers offering General Parisot a hand, but before he can decide she's jumped down as well.

"Spread out," she says once all the soldiers have disembarked. "Radio in if you find any accessible underground passages; if you find carvings, use your wrist cameras and send them back to base. Cadet, with me."

Lance follows. Somehow (not that he's complaining) he's fallen into some sort of hybrid assistant/bodyguard position for General Parisot. She's important enough that she shouldn't just wander about alone (especially since she thinks Keith and Shiro will be there), but they can't waste a full soldier just to guard her, and so the solution is Lance.

He's been outfitted with a full set of tactical gear. Though he's heard about all the materials research done recently, Lance still can't quite believe this thin, breathable fabric will withstand bullets. Then again, he personally doubts there's going to be anyone here to shoot at them...

Parisot stops suddenly, then touches a finger to her own ear. "All soldiers, sound off. What was that?"

Is Lance's radio not working? He taps his earpiece; nothing happens, even as Parisot nods at some unseen communication. Lance searches his pockets for the control.

"Private Jenkins, report."

Is someone actually missing? Already? Lance finds his radio controller, starts fiddling with knobs frantically.

After a few moments, there's a burst of static, and then Lance is hearing Parisot's voice twice over.

"Thank, you, Private. The rest of you, proceed with caution."

Great, Lance missed something because his radio wasn't working. He feels a pang for Hunk, who would have laughed at his plight, then forcefully shoves that thought aside. Hunk actively sabotaged them, and–

 _Shut up,_ Lance tells his brain, and follows Parisot as she starts walking again. He's got to focus; he should have tuned his radio on the way here, instead of letting his mind wander to the fact that no other ATV tracks were visible. But the thing is, Lance can't quite convince himself that there's any real need for his attention. Hunk wouldn't have gone missing, stealing Garrison property and sabotaging USF operations, unless he was sure he was going to the right place, and he'd had the intelligence– and access to Pidge– to make sure. So the fact that he's nowhere to be seen means, to Lance, that they're in the wrong place.

Parisot slides off a ledge toward a cave, and Lance almost falls off before he notices. He feels somewhat guilty for letting this pointless exercise go on– there are other sites they could be searching– but he's hesitant to speak up. The fierceness in Parisot's eyes when she'd found out what Hunk had done had been... disconcerting.

Lance doesn't doubt that Parisot means well; watching her for the last day, she's incredibly invested in saving the Earth. But he's not sure how far she'll go to do it. He remembers, now, that Shiro had been strapped to a table in that video before Keith cut him loose. Maybe Shiro was dangerously unstable, maybe the USF needed the information, but Lance has never believed that the ends justify the means, and he's becoming increasingly convinced that Parisot does.

So for now, he just follows her into the cave and keeps his mouth shut.

It's cool inside, and oddly humid. The walls are covered in dust, though the floors are clear as if someone has swept. Lance wonders if someone is hiding here after all, trying to hide evidence of walking through.

He reaches out to brush the dust off of what seems to be some kind of carving.

"General, the stolen vehi–"

The carving glows blue and Lance jerks his hand back; simultaneously, a burst of static interference flares over the radio. As light spreads down the tunnel, Lance catches a brief glimpse of Parisot turning toward him, shocked expression lit from below and eyes reflecting ghostly blue, before the floor gives out beneath them.

Water falls around him, surrounds him as he crashes to a stop, and Lance has a brief, confused flashback to the times his cousins threw him into the ocean, the way the breath abruptly left his body as he hit the water. But that was never this dark.

He rolls over just in time to get a faceful of water as Parisot stands. He wipes his eyes, looks up, then rubs them harder.

He must make some kind of noise, because Parisot turns. She starts speaking into her radio, and Lance vaguely registers voices responding through his earpiece, but the sharp, short sentences are drowned out by the rushing water. It sounds louder than it should be, as though those not-quite-flat yellow eyes are amplifying it somehow.

Lance stands almost as if in a dream; Parisot walks past him, and he drifts dumbly behind like a leaf in the current. A few loud splashes from behind make him turn his head, but before he's even really registered the soldiers landing, his gaze is almost magnetically pulled back to the lion's.

It definitely is looking at him, too; Lance feels like he's being measured by that stare, and he finds himself desperately hoping he's worthy.

There's a small pulsing noise as Parisot runs her hand over the blue lattice surrounding the lion. "Looks like some kind of forcefield," she comments. "I wonder how we can get through."

Lance steps forward. "Maybe we could just... knock," he says, and does so.

Blue light flows through a carving in the ground and suddenly, he is somewhere else entirely.

  
_T - 24:00:00_

Hunk gapes at Shiro. The unconscious body of a Garrison soldier, stripped of his gear, lies forgotten between them.

"Voltron is a huge, huge, awesome robot," he says. Then he chokes. What if Shiro didn't just have that vision? What if Hunk looks like a crazy person now? What if–

"They found the lion," Shiro responds.

  
_T - 23:59:54_

Pidge snatches up the pager, still blinking away the afterimages of a flaming sword and flashing yellow eyes. If it wasn't Keith, Shiro, or Hunk who found the lion, she has an extremely limited time until the people upstairs find out that her information is obsolete and don't let her out, and she needs to get out.

"I'll tell you about Voltron," she says.

Five minutes later, a guard opens her door, and she smiles grimly.

The list of things in space she has to find just got thrice as long; there's no more time to mess around.

  
_T - 23:44:38_

_Incredible_ , Keith thinks again.

It's all he's been able to think for the last twenty minutes or so. Shiro, at this moment, would point out that not thinking would explain most of Keith's actions over the last twenty minutes or so, except that he's still in a cave on the ground, while Keith is hiding in the hallway of an alien blue lion steadily leaving Earth, wearing stolen USF gear.

The cockpit is full of soldiers, as well as the secretive general of the USF and an oddly familiar cadet who is, apparently, flying the lion.

 _Incredible_ , Keith muses as he clings to a bulkhead, _that this guy managed to stay in the pilot program._

He's not supposed to be on the lion; Jenkins, the soldier he'd been impersonating, had been assigned to stand guard. But as soon as the rest had entered the craft, he knocked the other guard out and ran, barely making it inside before the lion stood and roared. It seemed like he was one of the few who'd had the vision; no way was he just letting them fly away.

"Cadet," the general says, "you need to land and turn over the controls." Keith supposes she's just as fed up of this guy's driving.

"I..." That voice is irritatingly familiar, and Keith can't quite place it. It definitely wasn't one of the fighter pilots from flight school... "I don't think I ca–"

There's an odd, computerized noise, then several sharp breaths from the cockpit.

 _Shit, we're going to run into something,_ Keith thinks.

The reality is infinitely worse.

"Humans," says Sendak's voice. "You will turn over the lion immediately, or I _will_ destroy your planet."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Technically, we got everyone's perspective in this chapter! Exciting.
> 
> Thoughts?


	8. Chapter 8

_T - 23:41:47_

The holographic projection of Sendak collapses to a point of light, then disappears. Lance feels a wave of irritated satisfaction at the Galra's departure, far too distant to be his own.

Parisot's fingers tap against the back of Lance's chair. On the viewscreen in front of them, the desert seems to stretch on forever. It's peaceful, and blank as Lance's mind right now. A small, inane part of him wonders what it would be like to fly over the ocean.

The world tilts as the lion turns west. 

"Where are you going?" Parisot barks, and Lance would point out that he hadn't even touched anything that time, but the dam holding his panic back chooses that moment to break.

"Oh my god," he gasps. "What do we do, oh my god." Fear rises in him like the tide, and his fingers curl around the throttle reflexively. The lion, the flying, all of it feels more right than anything in Lance's life ever has, and he doesn't want to give it away. But there's the rest of Earth to think about, his mom and dad and brother and sisters and cousins and classmates and–

A wave of calm breaks over him, and he sucks in a breath, wondering when he stopped doing that. And where did the calm come from?

Tentatively, he thinks of gratitude, tries to push it outward. 

Almost immediately, he receives a wave of affection, touched with concern.

Well, that's that then. The giant robotic alien lion is intelligent and piloted by telepathy. That's... something.

"Does this lion have weapon systems?" Parisot sounds thoughtful.

Lance barely has time to wonder before there's a laser shooting from the lion's tail.

The other two soldiers start. They've been relatively quiet thus far, and Lance has almost forgotten they were there. Everyone's obviously judging his piloting ability; they could easily pull him out of the driver's seat, take over...

A growl echoes through the cockpit, and next to Lance's head Parisot's knuckles whiten. "What are you doing, cadet?"

"Nothing," Lance says, and normally he'd be worried about sounding crazy, but he's a little dizzy with delight at the possessive affection coming from the lion. It chose him, Lance, and he wants to tell the world. "The lion's sentient."

"The l–" Parisot cuts off. "How do you know this?"

"It's talking to me. Or well, not talking, it's more like... feelings or something." He's starting to feel awkward calling the lion an it. _What gender are you?_ he asks.

Blank incomprehension. Figures.

"Feelings," Parisot says, sounding strained. "In your head?" One of the soldiers snorts, the one on Lance's right, and he resolves to make a sharp left turn at some point.

"Yes," he says. The lion doesn't have a mane; he can call it a girl. _Is that ok?_

Indifference touched with affection... Lance will take that as a solid whatever. _What about your name?_ he asks.

The sky on a clear summer's day. The clean, sharp smell of the ocean. The taste of his sister's blueberry smoothies. A view of the Earth from space, shrinking.

Lance's breath catches, with wonder and homesickness and longing. _Blue?_ he confirms, and there's a spark of recognition. Of course: a telepathic being's name wouldn't be just a word, but the meaning behind it.

Fingernails click on the seat, and Lance jumps. He'd almost forgotten that Parisot was there, and he finds himself dreading her order to give the lion up. It's been less than half an hour since he first saw Blue, and he's already developing an attachment, already feeling like she understands him better than anyone ever has.

"Uh..." Lance flounders for words. The soldier on the right snorts again, and Lance jerks the controls to the left, irritated. 

There are several sounds of impact from behind him, a few bitten-off curses. Lance determinedly doesn't turn around. "I guess we should go back to the Garrison," he says.

"You _can_ control it, then," Parisot says. It's not a question but Lance nods anyway. "No, don't go back. Go up."

"Up, ma'am?" Lance asks. He's stalling, trying to figure out how to avoid giving Blue up.

"Into space," Parisot explains impatiently. "We'll do some reconnaissance, get a better picture of what we're facing."

Lance sighs in relief.

"I'll go call the base, get a list of what they need to know, and the coordinates," Parisot adds. Her voice recedes as she apparently leaves the cockpit. "Hello, Garrison base? This is the general, let me speak to Sergeant Randha..."

Lance asks Blue to take them into space; he could try it himself, but if people are wandering around the lion, his... exciting style of piloting probably isn't the best thing. 

It takes about a minute for them to leave the atmosphere; even the shuttles taking various government officials to the Moon Base aren't this fast. Lance has been working so hard to become a pilot, and now the best ship just falls into his lap. He must have good karma from being such a great big brother or something.

A couple minutes later, when they've reached the orbit of Mars, Parisot comes back and gives him space coordinates. Soon, the Galra ships are looming. Blue is the size of a house or three; these behemoths together could probably hold a small city. A thrill of fear runs through Lance, and even the wave of reassurance sent by Blue isn't enough to smooth it away completely.

Parisot leans forward. Lance's eyes flick up; it's hard to read her expression from this angle, but she seems to be frowning.

"Go closer to that," she orders, pointing at some odd-looking protrusion on one of the ships.

They'll definitely be seen, but Lance supposes the Galra already know they have the lion, and what are they going to do? They're not going to shoot, they obviously want the lion back...

The thing he's trying to investigate looks kind of like a cannon, but also kind of like a loudspeaker; it's smaller in the back than the front, and both ends are square.

Purple light suddenly surrounds them, and Lance is hit with _panic_ screaming through his bond with Blue, and it's so sudden it feels like a physical blow that knocks him out of his chair. 

He sends confusion back, receives helplessness and anger and fear mixed throughout and poured over.

He drags in a few breaths, calms himself down. When he looks up, they're almost touching the ship, and Lance can see that at the back of the protrusion a door is opening, and he pulls at the controls, but Blue doesn't move, just sends another wave of anguish back.

"Tractor beam," says one of the soldiers.

Lance sits back on the chair as they enter a large cavern; the doors close beneath them and the purple light disappears.

Blue scrabbles at the closed doors like a dog digging for a bone, but her claws don't even leave a scratch.

Parisot puts a hand on his shoulder. "We need to get out of the lion," she says. Lance instinctively recoils and shakes his head as grey robot-looking things trickle into the room from a smaller door. They need to stay in the lion; they'd be sitting ducks outside it...

There's a movement behind him, and then a sharp pain in his head. His vision fuzzes out, his body goes numb, and he's flooded with outrage from Blue. A moment of confused motion, and then strong arms are pulling him out of his seat and he is falling...

He finds himself on the ground, staring up at Blue. She sends him apologetic embarrassment, concern. He sends confusion back, even as grey people enter his vision and pull him upright with hard metal arms– they must be robots, then. He sees Parisot, is barely able to make out what she's saying to the fuzzy purple eared creature facing them.

"Here is your lion," she says, and Lance feels a stab of... something. He can't remember, or never knew; it's hard to tell. Is he concussed? How did that happen? "How soon can we be returned to Earth?"

"Returned?" The purple fuzzy growls, and Lance remembers– it's a Sendak, right? Or is it a Galra named Sendak? Hmmm... "You'll be returned when we have everything we asked for. Perhaps. For now, you'll be a very good incentive."

The look on her face reminds him of the word he forgot earlier, the feeling he felt. 

"But thank you for the lion," Sendak drawls sarcastically.

Lance twists his head, sees Blue surrounded by what looks like a honeycomb. She's shut him out again. Lance remembers, suddenly, what word he was looking for.

Betrayal.

 

_T - 20:19:39_

One of the soldiers is glaring at Hunk accusingly.

It feels like a prickle on the back of his neck, and Hunk ignores it for as long as he can. He tries to focus on the radio again, not that that's any more comforting. It's been hours and the Garrison still hasn't gotten any news about what happened to the group in the lion. Parisot had called asking for the Galra ship coordinates and radio frequencies, and that had been it.

Shiro walks into the cave and goes straight to Hunk. "Pidge set up the computer to monitor the Galra, can you switch to that?"

"Probably?" Hunk leans over the computer. The prickling sensation is gone, and he glances at the soldier, who is now glaring at Shiro instead. Probably because Shiro was the one who actually captured him.

Hunk sighs unhappily as he fiddles with the computer. He wishes everyone would just get along; they're all on the same side, after all. If only there were a way to prove that...

He clicks a likely-looking button, and a guttural Galra voice fills the room. It's not speaking English, but Shiro's head swings around, brow furrowed.

"Oh no," he says.

"Can you understand that?" Wait, stupid question, of course he can, he's been living with them for a year. "What are they saying?" He scrambles to pull out a notebook and pen.

"He... it's Sendak, he basically says they have the lion, what are they waiting for?"

 _Lance_ , is Hunk's first thought, and then _oh God, what have we done_ , and then as another Galra responds he makes himself look up at Shiro and ask, "What now?"

Shiro's eyebrows are knitted, and Hunk realizes that Keith, too, is up there somewhere. But Shiro just closes his eyes and begins translating.

"The Champion must also be recovered. And we have reason to believe the other three paladin are also on this planet. Lor–" Shiro cuts off, then continues with a growl. "Zarkon wouldn't wish for them to slip away."

The first Galra, Sendak, barks a short reply. "Fine. I'll get the human general."

There's a prolonged silence.

"What's a paladin?" Hunk circles the term. Maybe he can help find them (he wonders, briefly, if the vision he had makes him one of them before dismissing the thought; he's a mechanic, not anything special), get them protected. Then again, that didn't work with the lion...

"I don't know."

"Of course you don't." Apparently the glaring soldier has gotten tired of keeping his mouth shut. "I can see what's happening. You want to make us think the General betrayed us to some hostile force, but really you're just trying to save your own ass."

Shiro doesn't turn around, doesn't take his eyes from the floor, but his fists clench.

"I don't think–" Hunk starts, but the soldier scoffs.

"Seriously? All we have is his word that he's not just making all this up, and he's been MIA for a whole y–" 

Static crackles. All of their heads turn toward the computer as Sendak growls something. Shiro opens his mouth, but is interrupted by the next voice.

"You've given me no reason to continue to cooperate with you."

It's Parisot's voice. Hunk watches the belligerent soldier's mouth drop open as she interrupts whatever Sendak says next.

"You did not hold up your end of our previous agreement. There is little purpose in trying to deal with you again."

"Oh," says the soldier.

The first Galra, the one Shiro never identified, is speaking again. "She says, 'So you refuse to negotiate?'"

Parisot responds. "Not until I and all my men are returned and you make a commitment not to harm the Earth."

The first Galra responds; her voice seems more menacing than before, though Shiro's translation is still flat and emotionless. "In that case, you are of no use to us."

It's a radio line, not a continuous call; there are no shouts of alarm, no sounds of Parisot being dragged away or... something else. There's only a silence far too easily filled by their imaginations, and then Sendak's voice once again. 

"What would you have me do, then, Druid?" 

Druid? The ridiculously futuristic aggressive aliens can't have magicians, too, can they? That would just be unfair.

"Negotiate with the remaining humans; they will want their leader back. Have them hand you any who have had a vision of Voltron."

Hunk's fingers go limp; the pen clatters to the ground as he looks up, meets Shiro's eyes. The two Galra repeat a single word, like a greeting, but Shiro doesn't translate it. Hunk's mouth is dry. Does that mean...

The annoying soldier pipes up again.

"I assume that look means you two are 'paladins'?"

 

_T - 18:33:28_

Keith wakes up with a start.

After listening for a moment, he begins to struggle out of the compartment he's in. When the general left the cockpit with a radio, he'd panicked and hidden in here. It had taken all of Keith's willpower not to jump out when he'd heard Sendak's voice, but he'd managed it. He immediately came to regret it when, not ten minutes later, he'd heard shouting and the lion had jerked violently before everything went quiet.

Unsure if the lion was about to be boarded, Keith had stayed put, and apparently fallen asleep.

Now, he sits in the dark hallway of the lion, wondering what to do next. Clearly, Parisot had managed to turn the lion over to the Galra. But the craft was still echoingly silent and pitch-black.

Well, not quite-- a faint light emanated from down the hall. Keith crawls carefully forward, blinking ineffectually. Gradually, he begins to make out shapes in the darkness: first that of his hands, then the walls, and finally the pilot's chair.

Keith looks out the window. The lion seems to be in a gigantic, otherwise empty room; the only light comes from a honeycomb-like bowl identical to the field that had surrounded the lion back in the cave.

He sits in the pilot's chair, stumped. The feeling he'd been getting when he sat still for the past year begins to creep over him, as though he's near a campfire, or facing the sun: a warmth that felt welcoming, like a call to come home. Keith had thought it was the lion, but here he is inside it, and the call is still there.

Maybe...

Keith tentatively reaches for the throttle. 

Before he can even touch it, the whole lion is moving, curling up like a cat and laying its tail over its head-- and, of course, covering the window. 

Keith feels a flash of indignation before the floor abruptly drops out from under him.

He hits the lion's paw hand's first, barely managing to turn his momentum into a roll. He's just caught his breath and opened his mouth to yell at the lion when a metal tail curls around his waist.

Keith gulps.

The tail whips outward, air buffeting Keith's face as he struggles haplessly, before suddenly his arms are free and he's flying, a scream tearing from his throat as he approaches the force field only to pass through it effortlessly, and there's the ceiling behind it, and a fizzling behind Keith as a beam of light passes below him-- Keith briefly imagines himself as a clay pigeon before he's smashing into a grate elbows-first and landing in a vent shaft.

Keith turns, dumbstruck. Just below the vent, a block of ice encloses a small infrared camera. The lion lays its tail gently over its eyes once again. As Keith stares, panting, a group of greyish people (robots?) burst into the room. Keith backs into the vent and then collapses, panting.

He feels the adrenaline drain out of his veins, heartbeat gradually slowing and breath gentling. He lies quietly there, contemplating what to do next.

He's alone and unarmed on a hostile alien spaceship with no plan and no purpose more specific than saving the planet and staying alive, and no guidance except for the ever-present call in his mind.

He closes his eyes. _Patience yields focus_ , as Shiro always tells him. He has a moment of vertigo, and then sees a mechanical lion, slender but powerful with accents in bright red. Its eyes glow, and they feel like sunlight on his face. He opens his eyes, takes a deep breath, and begins to crawl.

 

_T - 18:46:12_

Pidge stretches, feeling like a cat after a long, warm nap. It might be inappropriate, considering the situation, but there's nothing quite as satisfying as a job well done.

"It's finished," she says, and luxuriates in the impressed look she gets from Sergeant Randhawa in response. Her translation program is a work of genius, and she's irrationally happy that someone finally appreciates it. "It'll be a little rough on connotations, but it'll work."

"It's incredible," Randhawa responds. Pidge preens. "The whole world is going to take notice."

_I bet my bottom dollar you're going to be part of something that makes the whole universe sit up and take notice._

Her throat feels tight all of a sudden, and she clears it roughly. She's so close to getting her dad back she can practically _taste_ it; she can't get distracted now. "Yeah, well, only if we can keep it safe that long."

"Right," agrees Randhawa, turning back to her computer. "I'm sending you the files I've decrypted so far."

"Thanks," Pidge says. She's reminded that this is the woman who finished her decryption program; even with Pidge's notes, that's impressive. "I'll put them through, but it'll take a few hours. Is there anything else I can help with?"

She hopes whatever it is, it will involve more information about what is actually happening. When she'd gone to Iverson, he'd had someone take down everything she knew about the caves where the lion must have been, then dumped her with the communications officer without telling her anything. Par for the course, with him, but Pidge supposes it's only fair. She's been keeping back information too, specifically the vision and what it revealed about Voltron's true nature. Besides, Iverson is busy; from what Randhawa's mentioned, Parisot and the whole expedition have gone missing, though the general had briefly called in from the lion.

Even now, the rest of the headquarters is in a barely controlled frenzy. People are rushing around like headless chickens. Iverson is on the phone with someone, listening. The muscles in his neck are taut, giving away his clenched jaw; as Pidge watches, he finally loses patience with whoever is on the other end and barks something before hanging up. The whole place feels a moment away from a meltdown.

Humanity's defenders are remarkably disorganized; Pidge is slowly realizing that however corrupt Parisot may have been, she was one of the few people capable of preventing a panic. Iverson might not be.

"Well, there is something, actually," Randhawa says. "I don't think you'll be able to solve it, though."

Despite herself, Pidge perks up. She's always loved a challenge. 

"Someone's been piggybacking on the Galra's transmissions, sending some kind of recorded message. Look." She indicates her screen, and Pidge rolls her chair over to see the string of digits. She frowns as Randhawa continues; that looks familiar... "It's encrypted completely differently from the rest; actually, it has all the hallmarks of a pretty common type of encryption on Earth--"

"RSA." Pidge hears her own voice, as if from far away. The ambient noise in the room seems to have faded to a soft buzz, and she reaches for the keyboard, hands shaking, even as Randhawa continues talking, oblivious.

"Right!" Randhawa confirms. Pidge does a search for the program-- every cryptographer has it... "I guess it isn't even worth bringing up, factoring is a hard problem, no matter how smart you are you can't simulate that level of computing power."

There it is. She pulls up her email, searches back to five years ago, when she'd first been taught about cryptography.

"It's only that it's so frustrating, you know? It would be a matter of moments to decrypt, if only we had the..." Pidge copies the body of the email; several hundred seemingly random digits. _The product of two large primes_ , her dad had explained.

Randhawa's voice is soft, filled with all the desperate hope, all the doubt, that Pidge can't let herself feel. "The key."

Pidge puts the encrypted data into the program. Presses space to run.

The progress bar steadily filling mirrors the feeling rising in her throat. Pidge doesn't say anything, doesn't know what would come out of her mouth if she opened it. In the chair next to her, Randhawa doesn't seem to be breathing. They are the eye of a hurricane; around them, the room swirls with motion and a noise Pidge can _see_ , but here there is somehow absolute silence, and a bar inching toward one-hundred percent.

When the loading screen gives way to an MP3 file, the compulsion that had guided Pidge's hands almost without her knowledge gives way to utter paralysis. Because what if she's wrong, what if she opens the file and it's just gibberish? What will she do, now that the hope has crept in?

Randhawa seizes the mouse and opens the file.

There's a burst of static and Pidge sags, thinks, _I can't do this anymore_ \--

"Hello."

Her jaw drops.

"This is Commander Samuel Holt of the United Space Fleet, from planet Earth."

Randhawa grabs her hand.

"I am hailing from the Galra Druid vessel GS0165-D. I have been able to secure access to this computer; the elderly prisoners are hardly monitored, and I do not expect trouble. I will be monitoring the following frequency for a response."

As he reads a channel identifier, heads begin to turn in their direction.

"If you are part of a resistance-- dear God, I hope there's a resistance-- be advised that I've been able to gain access to the ship's logs, and therefore to the records of the Colmar experiment which I believe to be vital information."

A hush is beginning to fall over the room.

"If you are from Earth, this is a warning: the Galra empire is hostile to every race it encounters, and if this ship is nearby, it is likely that they intend to destroy all life on the planet as part of their experiments."

Whispers fill the room; Iverson strides toward them, expression darkening.

"Katie. If you're listening, if you've found this, I am so, so proud of you. I've missed you and your mother so much, and I'm going to need you to be brave now. Contact General Inge Parisot, show her this recording. She'll get you access to USF resources to get in contact with me. I know you can do it."

She sniffles and feels like she'll never stop smiling.

"I love you, kiddo."

A burst of static, and the file ends. The room erupts into noise again, but she ignores it. 

Pidge will be brave, soon, will do everything that needs to be done, will bring him home. For now, Katie crumples into Randhawa's open arms and sobs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, it's been a while, but have a super-long chapter! At just over four thousand words, this is the longest single chapter I've written; it's about twice as long as the other chapters in this fic. ~~And future chapters are only going to get longer oh god oh god~~
> 
> Anyway! As always, I love talking to people, so leave a comment here or come visit me on [tumblr!](http://radiantmists.tumblr.com) And I have a question for y'all: what should I name the annoying soldier? He isn't a major character so I hadn't planned for him, but he'll probably have a speaking role because I don't want to keep making up OCs and so he needs a name! (Any other information you'd like to provide me with on him is also welcome.)


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: ableism, including a fairly offensive attempt at feigning mental illness and some slurs. If you don't want to see that, read until "Where are you taking us?" and then use Ctrl-F to search for "The room is bigger than he'd expect".

_T - 18:07:12_

Lance's head is barely beginning to clear when the guards return. After leaving (being ejected from?) the lion, Parisot, Lance, and the two soldiers had been shoved into what seemed to be some kind of holding cell and left there.

After talking to him and making him walk around the cell for what seemed to be the thousandth time, Parisot had finally let Lance sleep. When he woke up, she was gone, along with one of the soldiers.

"They said Sendak wanted to talk to her,” the remaining soldier had said. "But that was an hour ago."

Lance had nodded, still feeling bleary from sleep. He'd sat in silence, trying to process the events of the last few hours.

Now, he barely manages to pick up his jacket, which he'd been using as a pillow, before one of the Galra grabs him by the arm.

"Wait, wait, wait!" Lance protests. "Hands off, man, I hurt my brain, not my legs."

He's ignored. Two more burly Galra come in for the soldier; a small part of Lance is offended that they sent the scrawny one after him.

"What have you done with the general?" the soldier asks, and is soundly ignored. "Where are you taking us?"

This time, he actually gets a response from Lance's Galra. "You will be housed with the rest of the prisoners. The mentally impaired one will be placed with the weak ones."

"Hey, I'm not--" Lance stops protesting when he realizes that the prisoners perceived as weaker might be monitored less carefully.

"Not what?" the Galra asks as he leads Lance from the room. He looks suspicious. Lance has to act more “mentally impaired.”

"C'n youu..." Okay, less slur, he just sounds drunk now. "C'n you pause, the video? The sound isn't timed, isn't right timed, with the, with the picture."

It's true, actually: when the Galra speaks, Lance can see his lips forming alien syllables, but he hears English. (That finally solves whether English or Spanish is his first language-- he'd learned both so early even his parents couldn't tell, and his first word being "no" hadn't helped.)

The Galra huffs, and though Lance can't tell, he's guessing it's accompanied by an eyeroll. "I thought dealing with the useless prisoners would be easier, but one more day of this and I'm going to go nuttier than you," the Galra tells him flatly.

Is this guy for real? "Peanut butter is the best," Lance agrees amiably.

The grip on his arm tightens painfully for a moment, and he decides to keep his mouth shut for the rest of the walk.

The Galra ship has an oppressive dark-purple-and-red color scheme that just screams evil, and Lance wonders if there's a cultural difference or if this society has just really embraced their role as villains. The halls are mostly impossible to tell apart, and Lance's hopes for an escape falter slightly. He's going to have to find a more reliable way of getting around than his memory.

Eventually, they reach a door. The Galra places a hand on a panel and shoves Lance into the room.

"Bye-bye, love!"

Lance can't resist. The Galra's fists clench as the door swishes shut.

Aaaand it smells like old people in here. Lance turns, smiling. "What's up, fellow special-treatment prisoners?"

The room is bigger than he'd expect a prison cell to be; the walls are lined with bunks, about thirty. There are no cameras that Lance can see.

Everyone in the room is staring at him.

Lance smiles winningly, and they turn back to whatever they were doing before. He scans them, trying to figure out which one to approach. Many are on their bunks and appear to be sleeping; probably no luck there, no matter how cool that big blue one looks. To Lance's left, a small purple alien is braiding a gigantic yellow one's flowing turquoise hair. Tempting, but no. Further in, a feathery lizard-man stares at Lance unblinkingly, nose twitching. Noooope.

In the back, there's a group of burly, scarred-up types who are talking intently to each other. Everyone else is staying far away from them. Lance takes a deep breath and starts walking. The toughest guys in the place would, logically, be the most open to making an escape attempt: Lance just has to convince them to let him join in.

He's halfway across the room when one of them notices him: two of her eyes slide in his direction and track his movement even as the other three remain trained on the people she's talking to, and of course the empty socket doesn't look at anything. It's more than a little disconcerting, and it's only with great effort that Lance keeps walking.

"Hello," he says, putting a little swagger into his voice. "I'm Lance."

"Lance," says one of them, eyeing him up and down. She's tall, but not too tall to pass for human- if it weren't for the too-sharp teeth, slit pupils, and gray skin. "I haven't heard the name. Have you been in the arena?"

Dilemma: tell the truth or give the answer she's obviously looking for?

"No," Lance says finally, because he doesn't think he'd be able to keep up the lie when he knows literally nothing about this arena. "You?"

They all laugh, for a long time. Lance smiles hesitantly even though the laughter feels the opposite of cheerful.

"Newbie, that's Vlath the Gouger," the many-eyed alien says. Her voice is high and clear and coldly amused. "One of the best gladiators there is. She has ninety-nine kills."

Ah. That's what the arena is.

"Now run along before I make it an even hundred," Vlath growls. Lance backs away, but another of the group grabs his arm.

"That sounds like fun," he says. "I've never seen one of this kind before. I want to see how he fights."

"He doesn't look like much," Vlath drawls dismissively, but there's a spark of interest in her eyes that makes Lance very nervous. He tries to reclaim his arm, but the grip on it is too strong.

"Yeah, but the desperate ones are the most entertaining," someone says. An audience is starting to form, and Lance's arm is freed, but there isn't a gap or friendly face in the ring.

"Alright," says Vlath's voice, and Lance turns. Vlath rises from her bunk, and there's a predatory grace to her movements, like a cat, that doesn't correspond to her size. She has a bandage wrapped around most of her upper left arm, but it only serves to highlight her muscles. Lance swallows.

Reluctantly, he shifts his feet into the stance he half-remembers from the Garrison-mandated self-defense seminar last semester. A whisper goes through the crowd, and Lance smiles- he's not going to be completely useless- but Vlath just smirks, weight resting lightly on the balls of her feet. She looks like she'll react fast and hit hard; Lance realizes he'll have to aim for the arm even though she'll be defending it, since he doesn't know anything about non-human weak spots--

"Wait!" shouts an oddly familiar voice. There's shifting in the circle behind him, but Lance doesn't dare turn around.

"What do you want?" Vlath asks, disgusted. Her eyes flick momentarily to a point right behind Lance before fixing back on his own.

"I'm surprised you didn't notice, Vlath," the voice says, and where has Lance heard it before? "I thought you were obsessed with The Champion." Lance can hear the capital letters.

"This--" Vlath gasps and recoils, and she looks almost... afraid? "He is human."

Her voice is a strange mix of awe, fear, and loathing. Lance tilts his head to the side.

"Right!" Cheer, even false cheer, makes that voice even more aggravatingly familiar. "So I'll just take him with me, and you can settle this in the arena when you have your spear. For... gouging."

A hand grabs Lance's shoulder and pulls him away. The little ring of people is already dissipating, but Lance's mysterious savior steers him by the shoulder back toward the front of the room.

Lance has, frankly, been manhandled enough today. He wrenches free- it's easier than he expected- and snaps, "Look, thanks for the retrieval, but if- holy crow you're Commander Samuel Holt."

Commander Samuel Holt smiles at him. "Call me Sam."

"Okay," he squeaks. "I'm Lance."

 

_T - 17:22:43_

Pidge is going to kill Principal Iverson.

This isn't the first time the thought has floated through her mind, but it is the first time it’s happened while he was being helpful. Or rather, while he was trying to be.

“I’ll call--”

“No!” Pidge yells, probably way too loudly. She winces. “I mean, maybe, but give me a chance to figure out what I need first.”

He squints at her, apparently missing the hint. Some people, _honestly._

Pidge groans. “Just… go over there,” she says, pointing at the opposite side of the room, “and take everyone non-science-y with you, and be _quiet_.” By the end of the sentence, her tone has changed from tired to outright frustrated.

Iverson glares, because of course he does. “I’ll remind you that I am in command here, Cad- Miss Holt.”

Wow, she never thought she’d miss being addressed as ‘Cadet.’

“Right,” she says. “Of course. So, _command_ all your soldiers to go away and let us think.”

He opens his mouth, then growls and turns away stiffly, starting to bark orders. Pidge smirks for a moment before turning back to her notebook.

So here’s the problem: transmit a signal strong enough to reach the asteroid belt, but inaccessible to everyone but Dad, and preferably undetectable. She has less than twenty hours, and relatively immediate access to all the USF’s resources.

It’s like one of those thought experiments, or a stupid word problem on a test; lots of possibly superfluous information and weird requirements. Pidge bends over her notebook in concentration, starting to outline specifications.

“Commander, the Galra ship is hailing us!” Pidge’s head snaps up.

“About time.” Iverson nods to the tech. “Put him through.”

As Iverson turns to one of the auxiliary screens, Pidge carefully starts rolling her chair toward him. Yes, she has a job, but she also needs to know what’s going on.

“…reason to believe your planet holds several more people of interest to us.” Sendak is talking, eyes fixed on Iverson. Behind him, another Galra (maybe Sendak’s lieutenant?) watches, his eyes flicking briefly to Pidge before moving away.

“Well, you have a bunch of people of interest to _us!_ ” Iverson barks. Pidge rolls her eyes; the corner of the Galra lieutenant’s mouth curls up, just a tad.

Sendak smirks. “Perhaps we can arrange a trade, then.” Of course.

“Who are we talking about here?” And Iverson is going to cave, because Parisot was apparently the only one with a spine around here. “We can’t just hand over random civilians.”

At least he’s trying.

“They aren’t random,” Sendak responds. “They are the pilots of the Voltron lions. We have one already, and the escaped prisoner is another. There should be three more.”

Iverson frowned. “So this… trade, it won’t include returning the cadet.”

“If that is the younger human flying the lion, you are correct.” So getting Lance back by diplomacy is essentially a lost cause. Someone else Pidge needs to get back, great.

“How are we supposed to identify the rest?” Speaking of Pidge’s list, she has to make sure Iverson asks about Dad and Matt. She’ll have to ask an aide to tell him, he’ll blow his top if he finds out she’s been eavesdropping.

“They generally all are at least acquainted. And they will have had visions—hallucinations—of the Voltron lions.”

Pidge’s head snaps back around to look at the screen. Is _she_ meant to be a pilot?

The Galra lieutenant is looking directly at her, head tilted. As her eyes widen, he smirks.

_Shit._

 

_T - 16:34:17_

Crawling was ridiculously hard on the knees. Keith had a new and very surprising sympathy for babies.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been shuffling through the vents. He’d stopped every so often when guards passed by below, or to find his bearings when two shafts joined, but weariness has long since seeped into his bones.

Keith rests his head against the wall of the vent, wishing he was smaller or that the shaft was bigger. He rolls onto his back and stretches his hands past his head, as far as they’ll go. His spine cracks, and he sighs in momentary satisfaction before his fingertips brush metal again. These vents are incredibly roomy, but they’re still clearly not meant for people to be crawling around in.

He feels like a mouse, helpless, cramped inside the walls, afraid to make a sound for fear that the exterminator will find him. The whole atmosphere is beginning to get to him: the feel of metal beneath his fingers, the cold, flavorless smell of the air, the sound of voices below—

“The casters have been chosen?” The voice is different than those of the other Galra, rasping like a snake’s scales over rocks; it even inspires the same rush of adrenaline, tension rushing down his spine and driving up his heartrate.

“Yes,” responds a similar voice. Keith shuffles carefully toward a grate; he has to see why these two are so different from the others. Maybe this is what female Galra sound like? “Sendak has the ships prepared?”

Two figures come into view, obscured slightly by the slats of the vents. They’re dressed in long, deep purple robes with hoods. “He does. Now it is only a matter of the paladins being retrieved.”

Paladins? Keith tilts his head, trying to look around the slats to see their faces. “And you trust his competence in that?” The speaker’s head rotates to the side, and Keith’s stomach rolls. That’s _not_ normal. Also, is that exposed bone on the other’s face?

When it begins to laugh and the face still doesn’t move, Keith chooses to believe it’s a mask for his own sanity’s sake. The laugh itself doesn’t help: a cascade of sibilant hissing, it plays on his frayed nerves like strings.

“Of course not,” it says. “I will speak to Lady Haggar. If the paladins cannot be caught, we can simply conduct the experiment as planned. After Colmar’s success, there is little chance they will escape.”

So they’re planning to do something to Earth regardless. Keith pulls back, mind whirling.

There comes the sound of cloth shifting.

“What is it?”

“For a moment, I thought I saw something moving in the vent.”

Oh no. Heart in his throat, Keith carefully edges backward.

“Likely just a cleaning droid.” Please buy it, please buy it…

“Yes.” Keith barely stops himself from sighing in relief. “Still…”

A blast of purple light burns through the grate, passing just millimeters from Keith’s face. He blinks, trying to clear his eyes as two sets of footsteps fade away.

Once his eyes have readjusted to the dimness of the vent, Keith looks around. The back wall of the shaft is scorched black. He takes a deep breath, trying to calm himself down, and almost chokes on acrid smoke. His heart is beating like a rodent’s, and he wonders that they didn’t hear it.

If Keith is a mouse, he’s just met the snakes.

 

_T – 16:01:14_

“So how are you going to stop the commander from sticking you two in a cell?”

Shiro leans forward in the ATV so he doesn’t have to shout over the wind. “Just get us through the front door. I’ll handle the rest.”

The man—Private Jenkins—is about Shiro’s age, or maybe a year or two younger, and when he nods in acknowledgement without further questions Shiro is uncomfortably reminded of himself, of his trust in Commander Holt. Trust that wasn’t misplaced, exactly, but… Shiro has come to realize that there are things in this world that no one can predict.

Being trusted, even admired, isn’t something Shiro is a stranger to; since his final year in flight school, when he’d been guaranteed acceptance into the Garrison, people have looked at him with a little bit of awe in their eyes. It had only grown as he’d flown through training, then the ranks in the USF; the new cadets would stare at him, dare each other to ask him for tutoring or even, on one horrific occasion, his autograph. He hadn’t liked it even back then, but now it makes his skin crawl, especially with the dash of suspicion that’s been added to the mix.

It all goes back to those things he only half-remembers, to a stadium cheering for him and cells going quiet as he was escorted past.

But it doesn’t matter. Shiro squares his jaw and looks ahead to where the Garrison is beginning to come into view, then down to Hunk, who’d fallen asleep halfway through the trip. People are relying on him, and he has to be worthy of that trust, no matter how he might feel about it.

Even if being worthy of that trust requires him to take advantage of it.

As they draw up to the gates, Shiro leans back and examines the faces of the guards that greet them.

“Jenkins! Finally!” barks an older soldier before glancing back at Shiro and Hunk in the back. He raises an eyebrow, but turns back to the driver. “Where’s the rest of your squad?”

He’s no good, Shiro decides, not for this. While Jenkins explains that the other ATV is following, Shiro’s attention shifts to the other guard. He looks about Shiro’s age, although certainly younger than people seem to think Shiro is. More importantly, though, he keeps glancing at Shiro shyly. Eventually, he manages to catch the soldier’s eyes and nods, attempting a smile. The man’s jaw drops, just slightly, before he pulls it together and smiles back.

“Palmer!” The soldier jumps as his partner calls his name. “Open the gate, and escort them inside! The rest of you, report to the ground force captain.”

“Yes sir!”

As the ATV pulls forward once again, Hunk bolts upright.

“I’m awake, I’m awake!” He glances around, takes in the compound. “Oh. We’re here.”

The Garrison, in many ways, hasn’t changed at all since Shiro graduated; the buildings are the same, as are the uniformed soldiers patrolling the perimeter. But it’s remarkably empty. Hunk had mentioned that the students had been evacuated, but Shiro hadn’t been able to envision it, hadn’t imagined the way the quiet would echo without laughing first-year pilots on break, the way the absence of training ground forces doing drills would fill the courtyard more thoroughly than they ever had. A school without students was a strange thing.

They stop in front of the main building, the one that holds the mess hall, instructor’s lounge, and most importantly, the principal’s office. They clamber out of the vehicle, Shiro making his way to the front of the group, where the soldier from the gate—Palmer— looks at him, squaring his jaw.

“I’m going to have to restrain you,” he says, sounding reluctant. Shiro considers; it might be worth conceding, if it means he can talk to Iverson sooner. But he needs to look trustworthy, strong but in control, and the cuffs the soldier is holding won’t help that image.

“Private Palmer, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

Shiro puts a hand on his shoulder—the left hand, though the motion feels unnatural; no need to draw attention to the magic alien death prosthetic—and smiles. “I have important information I need to share with your commander, Private Palmer. Why don’t you take me to him, and let him decide whether I need to be restrained.” It’s phrased like a question, but it’s clearly not one.

Palmer looks up at him— Shiro has always been tall, impressively so—and seems to hesitate. “You’re supposed to be dangerous.”

Shiro chuckles. “Which one of us has a gun?” Palmer tentatively smiles, before his eyes fall on the arm uneasily. Shiro sighs internally and resists the urge to clench his fists—he has to show control. Commander Holt was always better at putting people at ease, and suddenly Shiro is fighting to keep his face free of guilt—protecting the Holts was his job, and he’s failed pretty comprehensively at that. How can he expect leading to go any differently?

Instead, he quirks his lips, making the smile a little more wry. “Besides, the people here practically raised me, you know. I wouldn’t hurt them.” A reminder of his very well-known, very illustrious career, how young he’d been accepted into the Garrison and how much reason he has to be loyal to it…

Palmer chews his lip, then nods. “Alright. You won’t need me to guide me to the command center, I suppose.”

“Right,” Shiro says, stepping up beside him. “Why don’t we talk as we go?”

“Ok,” Palmer says eagerly, falling into step with Shiro. “What did you want to talk about?”

Shiro smiles again, the expression feeling slightly less fake. “Why don’t you tell me what’s been happening on Earth for the past year? I haven’t really had the chance to catch up.”

“Sure,” Palmer agrees. It’s nice to have a normal conversation, though Shiro can’t quite forget the context. Hunk and Jenkins are following behind them, neither contributing to the discussion. Hunk, Shiro can tell, is still waking up, but Jenkins’s silence worries him. The man had been fairly suspicious of Shiro back in the cave, and though he heard Parisot speaking to the Galra, he also just saw Shiro talk his way into the command center, a good reason to be suspicious. Unfortunately, he also knows that Shiro and Hunk are part of the group of paladins Sendak is looking for.

When they reach the command center doors, Shiro pauses and takes a deep breath, turning back to Hunk and Jenkins. “Wait out here for a second, okay?” Then he steps through.

If the rest of the base is eerily lacking in people and noise, it’s because they’ve all been packed in here: the room is a whirlwind of activity, a hurricane centered around a small figure with wild brown hair, sliding frenetically around the room in a rolling chair. Pidge, Shiro realizes, and something eases in his chest knowing she’s alright, that she’s not locked away somewhere.

It takes a moment for him to be noticed, but not long after that for there to be guns pointed at his face. Shiro fights, hard, not to react; he _needs_ to be in control. He focuses on the real, human face of Commander Iverson glaring at him, and weirdly, it helps, grounding him in this moment and keeping him from being dragged down by faceless heads and grasping hands. He slowly raises his hands, palms open.

“Why isn’t he in cuffs?” Iverson demands of no one in particular. Shiro blesses his own foresight in coming in alone—no need to get poor Palmer in trouble.

“I just came to talk. I’m not going to hurt anyone,” he assures them evenly. Appearances are important: if a leader is calm, those who follow him will be as well.

Like almost everything he knows about leadership, Shiro didn’t learn that here. He learned it from Commander Holt.

“You broke a man’s nose, gave another a concussion, and tried to choke a third to death!” protests Iverson.

Pidge clears her throat. “The nose was me, actually, though since I was being tazed at the time I don’t think you can blame me.”

It helps diffuse the tension a little, enough for Shiro to speak. “Principal Iverson, you know me. I don’t get into fights without good reason.”

Iverson opens his mouth, closes it. “Fine. So what were your reasons?”

Cautiously, Shiro lowers his hands. “The Galra… they’re like a plague. They’ve conquered and destroyed hundreds of planets—I met other prisoners from enough planets to know they won’t keep their end of any bargains.”

Iverson clenches his teeth, then looks around at the rest of the room staring at them, barks: “Get back to work, all of you!” Then he strides forward, toward Shiro. “Why didn’t you just come in with the retrieval team, then? And why come back now?”

Shiro sighs. “I have information that could be useful. And before… with respect, sir, there wasn’t time to talk sense into all of command. We needed to act quickly to keep the Voltron out of Galra hands—“

“That was not your decision to make, Shirogane!” Iverson reprimands. “The command structure exists for a reason.”

Shiro _burns_ to argue, to justify himself, but there’s nothing to be gained by this argument right now. “Yes, sir.”

Iverson glares at him for a while longer, but is apparently placated by Shiro’s lack of further resistance. “What information did you have, then?” he asks.

Shiro turns back to the door and motions for Hunk and the two privates to come in. “Using Pidge’s equipment, we were able to intercept some Galra transmissions—"

“Hunk!”

Pidge has leapt out of her rolling chair, the arrayed scientists scrambling out of her way. “I need your help, we got a transmission from my dad—"

Shiro just… stops. “Commander Holt is alive?”

Pidge smiles.

 

_T - 14:17:37_

Almost there…

Hunk puts down the screwdriver. “Should work now.”

Kirit looks up. “Really? Because I don’t see anything different from the last time. Or the time before that.”

She’s definitely more tired than she was before he left. He’d hoped she’d sleep for a while once she wasn’t hopped up on caffeine, but apparently she’d gotten in trouble for not noticing. And then she’d been working with Pidge, and running communications with Parisot’s group before they got captured. Every time she speaks it’s a little more sarcastic and a little less kind, less _her,_ and Hunk… worries.

“No, it’s definitely fixed,” Pidge chirps. “His solution was pretty genius, actually.”

Pidge, on the other hand, is remarkably cheerful. It’s as though the weight she’s been carrying the entire time Hunk has known her is suddenly gone—he supposes it is. The problem, of course, is that every time the machine fails, the weight returns, and Pidge returns to the impatient, irritable gremlin Hunk had gotten used to.

Still, the respect is nice.

Hunk blushes. “I mean, sure, nobody else thought of it, but that doesn’t mean it’s genius, I mean someone was going to get it eventually—“

Kirit smiles. “I’m sure it was genius. So let’s try it out, okay?”

“Right,” Hunk agrees, reaching up to the switch. “Okay, here we go.”

He bites his lip and flicks it. The transmitter hums to life, a rush of static crackles through the speaker—and then the whole thing shuts down.

“What?” Pidge whines.

Hunk groans. “Seriously? I _know_ that fixed the power problem.” Then, even though he knows it’s a bad idea, he adds “It _has_ to be a software thing.”

Pidge straightens. “Or maybe _you_ left a wire loose. Again.”

“You really _are_ children,” Kirit muses without looking up from the code. “I was beginning to wonder.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She’s calling them immature, but Hunk has a better explanation: they’re tired. Physically, mentally, emotionally, it’s been a wild ride, and none of them can take too much more of it. However important this is, they all need to get some rest before they start making more explosive mistakes.

“Oh, just…” Kirit pauses. “Here it is.”

Pidge cranes her neck to look at the screen. “Here what is? That function is _fine._ ”

“Well, it would be if you didn’t have this bit. Off-by-one error.”

“No, that’s for— ohhhhh,” Pidge bangs her head against the back of the chair. “How did I not notice that?”

Kirit shrugs, typing. “It’s not unusual in this kind of situation. You learn what to look for after a while.”

Before Pidge can take the brusque statement as condescension, Hunk pipes up: “That’s right, you’ve been working for the USF for ten years, right? You must have worked on some awesome things.”

Kirit smiles. “Yeah. I started as one of twenty or so interns for Commander Holt’s Alpha Centauri probe project, and I’ve never really looked back…”

Pidge is looking at Kirit with adoring eyes now, and Hunk smiles. He’d thought these two would get along if they just gave each other a chance.

He watches them talk for a moment, then sighs. He hates to break in, but the sooner they get this done, the better.

“Is it fixed?” He asks. At their nod, he flips the switch again.

The transmitter hums to life. The radio crackles with static, then clears.

Hunk glances around; both Pidge and Kirit seem frozen, so he leans into the microphone. “This is the Galaxy Garrison of Earth, hailing Commander Samuel Holt. This thing is basically cobbled together from anything we could find on the base, so if we’re fuzzy, let us know, we’ll make some tweaks.”

He rambles when he’s nervous, okay?

More static, then— “Hunk, you big, gassy genius!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are quite a few things I'm unhappy with in this chapter, but it's been a looong time, so I decided to just call it done. What do you guys think?
> 
> Sometimes, I post progress updates on [tumblr!](http://radiantmists.tumblr.com/) Come talk to me there, or leave a comment!


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After some consideration, I'm changing the rating of this to teen; this chapter isn't significantly more horrifying than previous ones have been, but I think the story has probably reached the tipping point.

_T – 14:10:21_

Pidge shoves herself toward the microphone, almost falling into Hunk’s lap in the process, but there are more important things happening. “Lance, is my dad there?”

“I’m here, Katie.”

(Kirit takes one look at her face and says, “I’m going to take a nap,” before leaving. Hunk looks like he’d do the same if Pidge wasn’t on top of him.)

She sniffles and feels tears in her eyes, though she could have sworn she’d cried herself out. “I missed you, Dad.”

“I missed you too.” She can almost see his face as he says it, not smiling with teeth the way he does for jokes, but soft, mouth only slightly quirked but beaming everywhere else. Pidge wants to see it, wishes once again for this to all just… be over. Hunk puts an arm around her shoulders, and she sighs. She can feel the energy that had been driving her start to fade, the temptation to let someone else handle everything rising in its place.

Someone walks up behind her, and she tenses before hearing Shiro’s voice.

“Did you get through to Commander Holt?”

His tone echoes the conflicting hope and worry that Pidge had felt when they switched the machine on. She looks up at him even as Dad’s voice sounds from the speaker.

“Is that Shiro I hear?”

Shiro’s face would be hilarious if it wasn’t so heartwarmingly sincere; his constantly furrowed brow and worried frown slide into blank surprise for a moment before he smiles. “You’re alright.”

Dad laughs. “And so are you! I heard that you’d escaped, but you made it back to Earth, too! How’d you manage it?”

Shiro frowns. “I don’t know,” he says slowly. “All I remember is us being captured, and them taking you away from me and Matt, and then—“

Pidge looks up. “Then what? Dad, is Matt with you?”

“No—“

“What?” Shiro leans closer to the mic. “Commander, I thought I got him sent to the infirmary!”

Pidge looks up. “I’m sorry, what?”

Shiro bites his lip, still looking faraway, and says, “I grabbed the sword from the guard, and I… I aimed for his leg…”

“You did _what?_ ” Pidge surges to her feet. Hunk makes a pained yelp and a small part of her realizes that she’s standing on his foot, but the rest of her is too angry to listen to him.

“Pidge, calm down!”

“Calm _down?!_ He attacked my brother!” She gestures wildly in Shiro’s direction. He stumbles backward, and then his foot catches on one of the cords tangled all over the floor and everything comes down with a crash and a rush of static that cuts off abruptly.

Pidge blinks at Shiro on the floor, at the speaker lying between them, silent.

“And now he’s destroyed the communicator! Are you going to go after Mom next, you—“

“PIDGE!”

She’s never heard Hunk yell like that before. Pidge is so shocked that she stops being angry for a moment, and that’s when she takes in the scene. Wires and electronics strewn all over the floor, the whole room staring at them (thank goodness Iverson finally went to take a nap), and Shiro on the ground looking shocked—or shell-shocked.

Hunk sighs, not mad but disappointed, and Pidge feels like a four-year-old being told to share. “I can fix the communicator, but seriously? There’s obviously some context we’re missing here, and blowing up like that was not cool.”

Pidge swallows. She’s supposed to be the reasonable one here. “Sorry,” she tells him, moving out of his way.

Shiro stands gingerly and steps carefully out of the mess, rubbing the back of his head, and Pidge feels guilt crawling up her throat as Hunk starts picking things up, squinting at wires and grumbling to himself. She stifles the sensation; it’s uncomfortable, and she had a good reason to be angry.

“You better have a really good explanation,” she says, looking up at Shiro. He looks pained, and when he responds he sounds wary, like she’s something dangerous, or fragile.

“They were sending us to fight the current champion, and he was supposed to go first. I was just trying to make it so they’d send him to the work camps instead.”

“Oh,” Pidge says, deflated, and now the guilt is harder to swallow, because he helped Matt when no one else could, and what does she do? Attack him, of course. Because there was no other reasonable option, apparently. “I’m sorry for… this.”

He quirks his lips; she refuses to call it a smile even though his eyes soften affectionately, because he still looks so _exhausted_. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Thank you. For protecting him.”

Shiro looks surprised, and when he says, “I tried my best,” it mostly sounds like an apology.

Pidge thinks about Shiro blaming himself for what’s happened to her family, about how she might have reinforced that, and feels like crying. She throws her arms around his waist instead. “Thank you so much.”

Slowly, the muscles against her cheek relax, and a warm arm wraps around her shoulders. “Thank _you_ ,” he says, and it’s the wrong response but she supposes it’s the best she’ll get. Shiro’s chest is warm and solid, and he holds her exactly right, not squeezing or limp. Pidge notes to hug him again in the future, since it seems to help both of them.

“Helloooo?” Lance’s voice floats out from the speaker. Shiro’s arms drop, and Pidge pulls away reluctantly. “Hunk? Garrison? You guys there?”

Hunk turns back to the transmitter. “Yeah, buddy, we’re back.”

“Everyone okay there?” Dad asks, not sounding especially concerned. “I thought I heard Katie’s battle cry before the connection cut off.”

Pidge jolts, mortified. “Dad!”

“See? Our Katie can be scary—I remember once when she was four, Matt took—“

“Dad! We agreed you wouldn’t tell that story anymore!”

He laughs. “Fine, fine.” Pidge sighs, relaxing—too early. “I wonder if Matt still has the scar?”

Over her own, “Oh my god, dad!” Pidge almost misses Shiro’s “That’s what it’s from?” Almost.

She sinks limply into a chair, then bangs her head onto the table for good measure. “My life is over.”

“Ummm… “ Hunk looks lost. “Anyway, you said before that he wasn’t with you?”

Dad sighs. “No. He came back from the arena and told me about what Shiro did, but he recovered well enough that they sent him to one of the camps. I got kept on the cleaning crew because I’m old.”

So Matt is still out there. Pidge is about to ask if her dad knows anything else when Hunk says, “Cleaning crew? Don’t they have, like, robots or something for that?”

That’s actually a really good point.

“Yes, actually!” Dad confirms. “Our job is mostly to process what they bring in as trash for anything useful.”

Shiro leans in. “Is that how you got computer parts?”

“Yes! Most of the drones are really terrible at recognizing individual electronic parts; I think it might be intentional, so they don’t learn how to build more of themselves—they’re smart enough for it otherwise, it’s really amazing what the Galra have done with artificial intelligence—“

“Commander,” Shiro interrupts, sounding fond. “Maybe later?”

“Right you are, Shiro!” Dad agrees. “The next shift is starting soon, and I still haven’t told you the most important thing!”

Lance butts in. “He hasn’t told me the most important thing either, actually, because you guys hailed us at the exact wrong moment, and the suspense has been killing me, so try to stay on track, okay?”

Pidge groans. “Seriously, Lance? You realize you’re the one who’s off track now, right”

“Well now it’s you!”

“Are you _stupi—“_

“Guys. Stop.” Shiro looks tired again, and Pidge guiltily closes her mouth. “Commander Holt, what is the most important thing?”

“A few days ago, we had a drone head come through, and I found the interface port,” Dad says. “If I can get access to an active one, we’ll have a direct line to the ship’s systems.”

“Oh,” says Lance.

With access to the ship, they can intercept communications, look at records, maybe even shut down weapons systems…

“If you manage that,” Pidge says, “we could actually _win_.”

She watches Hunk and Shiro’s faces as realization sinks in. Suddenly, this frantic search for a solution actually has some hope.

“Right,” says Shiro, standing up. “Commander, let us know when you do that. And… Lance, right?”

“Yes, sir.” That sounded suspiciously eager…

“You’ll be able to get Commander Holt a drone, right?”

“Yes sir!” Yup. Lance was definitely one of the people with a poster of Shiro on his wall in high school. So much teasing material…

Dad breaks in. “We’ll get back to you about that soon—the guard will be coming in any minute now, so is there anything else we need to talk about?”

There’s a brief pause wherein Shiro bites his lip, looking frustrated, before horrified realization spreads across his face. He opens his mouth.

“No?” asks Dad. “Good, because the guard is coming in now goodbye.”

“Wait! Have you seen—“

The transmission cuts off with a snap.

“Keith,” Shiro finishes lamely. Pidge frowns.

“Why would they have seen Keith?” she asks. Until now, she’d figured that he had stayed away from the Garrison as a secret weapon/free agent in case turning themselves in went wrong, so she’d avoided mentioning him, but now…

“He stowed away on the lion,” Hunk explains. “Or at least, he knocked out the soldier they left to keep watch when they went into it, and then disappeared, so that seems like the most probable option.”

Pidge hasn’t known him long, but it also seems like the most Keith-ish option if his breakout of Shiro is any indication: reckless, impulsive, and yet somehow successful. Kind of. If being stuck and possibly taken captive on a hostile ship in outer space could be counted as successful.

“He’ll probably be fine,” she says, knowing it isn’t very reassuring.

“Well, there isn’t much we can do about it from down here right now,” Shiro says, still looking worried, before he seems to refocus. “Getting into the ship’s systems will help solve all of our problems. Hunk, you round up everyone with hacking experience; this doesn’t sound like a one-man job. I’ll take everyone else and assemble some kind of strategy for what systems we want to prioritize. Pidge, you can start working on the actual code.”

“I will, but give me twenty minutes first,” Pidge responds.

“Of course,” Shiro says, hesitates, then adds, “Can I ask why?”

“I need to call my mom.”

 

_T – 13:56:10_

Lance has a mission from _Takashi Shirogane,_ to help _Commander Samuel Holt._ (Sam, corrects the corner of his brain in charge of being sensible while the rest of him fanboys helplessly for a moment.) It’s like a dream come true, in that Lance has literally had dreams like this. Those all went well, except for the ones that went awry in the inescapably doomed way that nightmares generally do and which obviously won’t apply in real life. Lance is going to _ace_ this.

Okay, delirious fan time over. The other prisoners are rising and heading toward the door, while Sam tugs at his blanket in a way that looks like he’s trying and failing to straighten it but is likely meant to disguise the outline of the computer.

“Move!” yells the guard from the door. It looks like the same one, though it’s hard to tell because of the helmet. (Seriously? Someone needs to get these guys a copy of the Evil Overlord list, except not actually because exploitable weaknesses are going to come in handy against a race this advanced.) His gaze sweeps from the two of them to Vlath’s group of arena vets in the back of the room, who are taking their sweet time, and Lance takes the opportunity to whisper to Comm—Sam.

“I’m only here because they think I’m brain-damaged,” he explains. “Can you pretend to guide me wherever we’re going?”

“Sure,” says Sam. But instead of taking Lance’s elbow or shoulder as he’d expected, the man throws an arm around him before heading for the door, forcing them to walk awkwardly close together.

“I don’t like surprise hugs,” Lance comments as they pass the guard, hoping that Sam will correctly interpret the statement as _why is this happening._ There has been far too much manhandling today already.

Lance’s spine prickles as Sam whispers, “This way I can talk to you. The security cameras pick up sound, unless it’s very quiet.”

That makes sense, though Lance is eerily reminded of the way dream-logic can explain away the most outlandish things.

He should probably respond, but he’s facing the wrong way for a whisper to reach Sam and no one else. Gibberish it is. “Like mice,” he announces cheerfully. The prisoner in front of him twists their head around—literally, like an owl or a periscope—and twitches the patch of fur right above their single, luminous teal eye.

“We’re going to have to knock out a drone,” Sam mutters.

“The people in the ceiling are watching me already,” Lance informs the nosy prisoner, hoping Sam catches the reference to cameras. “You don’t have to bother.”

The prisoner flushes pink (magenta?) and faces forward once more.

“The incinerator room has no camera inside, just one facing the door,” Sam explains. “Prolonged exposure to heat would ruin anything permanently installed. But there’s a rotation of drones stationed inside. We’ll hit it with something heavy, and I’ll get inside its head and then reboot it while you distract anyone who tries to come in. The lost time will probably be seen as indication that it’s been in the incinerator room for too long, anyone even notices. That seem clear?”

Lance looks up at the ceiling. “It’s like glass,” he giggles.

“Hopefully not as fragile,” Sam comments at normal volume, making Lance jump. “Or we’d all be sucked into the vacuum of space if someone falls too hard.”

And that’s an ominous reminder that they are in a very precarious position. Lance swallows.

It isn’t long before they reach their destination. As the door slides open, a deep, throbbing hum fills the air. The room they enter is huge— Lance is fairly sure an entire football stadium could fit inside—but most of it is empty space.

The whole room seems to slope inward, like a funnel or a drain; the outer wall is covered in metal tubes. As Lance watches, debris comes spilling in to land on a conveyor belt. They file in that direction, but Lance’s attention is drawn toward the object at the room’s center/bottom instead.

About a hundred feet from it, a circle of drones watch the prisoners, cradling heavy-duty blasters. Behind them, encased in what appears to be glass and with large tubes stretching away from it, is a throbbing ball of… something. It’s black, but Lance somehow gets the impression that it’s glowing, the intensity of the light waxing and waning in time with the humming. It’s almost hypnotizing, fascinating in its utter foreignness.

“Lance,” Sam says sharply. Lance turns his head back and realizes that they’ve reached the conveyor belt. He moves aside a little to allow Sam to take a spot next to him.

“What is that?” he asks quietly. The nearby prisoners can probably hear it, but the question is a natural one rather than part of the plan, he’s not trying to fool any of _them_ about his sanity, and there’s no way the cameras or the distant guard will pick it out over the thrumming of the air around them.

“I’m not sure,” Sam says, “but I think it’s one of the ship’s gravity generators.”

“Why is it in the same room as _trash processing?_ ” Lance asks, only a little hysterically. Of course the Galra have mastered artificial gravity, he _has_ been walking around the ship normally, but he didn’t think a random prisoner would get to _see_ the thing that did it.

“As far as I can tell?” Sam asks, looking sympathetic. “Convenience.” At Lance’s frown, he adds, “The trash chutes just take advantage of the fact that this is gravitationally the bottom of the ship. Also, the incinerator uses the excess heat that thing generates.”

Lance looks down at the belt, where the remains of what looks like someone’s lunch pass by. “So all this is getting incinerated?” he wonders.

“Of course not,” Sam says. “Most of this just goes on to the next room, where it’s sorted by drones into types to be recycled by the ship,” he explains. “We just pull out the sensitive stuff for incineration—computer parts, corrosive material... things the drones either can’t process or are too valuable for.”

Right—evil empire. Slave labor is probably cheaper and more easily replaced than robots.

“Start filling a cart,” Sam says. So they do. The belt passes by very quickly, and Lance supposes it’s a good thing there are so many of them, because he’s definitely missing things that should be removed. Someone up the line is doing an even worse job, though, and Lance peers up to see Vlath and one of the other gladiators talking, not even looking at the belt despite their surfeit of eyes.

The work isn’t hard, but it never seems to let up, and after a while Lance feels like no nightmare he’s had could compare to this endless stream of garbage, except in a dream it would pile up instead of neatly disappearing, and he would drown in it, ears still ringing with that incessant hum…

“How do people make this much trash?” he wonders helplessly.

The teal-eyed prisoner snorts. “This is nothing. Just wait until the dinner rush.”

Lance swallows. Thankfully, that’s when the nearest cart to them finally reaches capacity.

“I’ll show him the incinerator,” Sam volunteers. The other prisoners make it clear that he’s welcome to it, though Lance can’t imagine why they aren’t all clamoring for the opportunity to take a break.

When they’re about halfway to a door, Sam mutters, “Look for something heavy we can use,” and Lance remembers the plan, scanning the top of the cart for likely instruments of blunt-force trauma. There’s a hefty-looking screen of some kind…

The hallway they enter is full of cameras and oddly warm but blessedly quiet, and Lance adds “effective soundproofing” to the list of remarkable futuristic technology the Galra have mastered.

Sam is silent as they push the cart along, so Lance doesn’t voice any of his many questions, nor his unease as the temperature rises and the floor slopes down, like some kind of descent into hell…

After a minute or so, they reach a heavy door marked with red Galra script that Lance is willing to bet money reads something along the lines of “Danger: Keep Out.” Sam taps the head of the cart against the door, and it flashes purple and opens.

A wave of hot air rolls out, and Lance is reminded of the worst summer afternoons back home, where anyone who came in from outside was immediately subject to a round of irritated scolding until the AC could begin to restore the room to a livable state.

Somehow, it was even hotter inside, and the humming is louder than ever. The air seemed to shimmer above a glowing red grate that covered the back half of the floor. A drone stands near the grate, for some reason staring at the opening in it. Lance wonders if there’s a chance of flares coming out or something, then decides not to ask. ”What now?” Lance asks, hoping Sam can hear him.

“Prisoners jump in sometimes,” Sam yells. Well that answers the question Lance didn’t choose, kinda… “The Galra don’t care, but they like to know that the prisoner’s dead and not running around on the ship somewhere.”

Okay, then.

“Choose your weapon,” Sam says, and Lance picks up the screen he’d noticed earlier. It’s heavier than he’d expected it to be, and he hopes he’ll be able to swing it with enough force. He’s not sure how much of his sweat is from heat, and how much is due to nervousness.

Sam nods, and gestures for Lance to stand back a little. He pushes the cart toward the grate, and the drone turns to watch him. As he tilts the card forward, allowing the trash to fall in, he shoots Lance a look that Lance hopes means _Now,_ because that’s what he’s interpreting it as.

Lance steps forward and puts his weight into the swing, realizing at the last moment that if he hits too hard and the screen’s inertia takes over, he and the drone will both fall into the incinerator. He tries desperately to check its momentum, and that’s when it flies out of his sweaty fingers.

It hits the drone’s head with a dull thump and bounces off, but the robot must be made of solid stuff, because though its neck jerks forward sharply, it doesn’t fall. There’s a heart stopping moment where Lance thinks it didn’t work, that they’re going to get caught, and then the drone crumples to the ground.

Sam pulls the cart back and reaches up his sleeve, pulling out something that looks less like the flash drive Lance was expecting and more like a bunch of random wires, slides the other hand under the drone’s chin and _yanks_ , because apparently when he said he needed to get inside its head, he was being literal.

The inside almost looks like a glowing purple brain, which is apparently what Sam was expecting, because he doesn’t even hesitate before sticking his hands in. Lance watches in horrified fascination until Sam says, “Go stand in front of the door.”

Lance has a feeling this is going to take longer than he’d thought. He arranges himself so that he should be blocking Sam from view, then waits, feeling useless. So far, he’s just been an extra pair of hands, and he almost screwed up even that; if the screen had gone flying at a slightly different angle, or if it were a bit heavier or lighter—

The door slides open.

Lance straightens in surprise, and looks over the full cart to meet the triumphant eyes of Vlath.

She smirks. “What are you doing in here, human?” Over her shoulder, Lance notices a camera aimed at the door, which means he has to keep up the act.

“It’s so nice and warm!” he comments, trying to sound cheerful. Vlath glowers.

“I know you’re faking, and that act is infuriating,” she growls. “Desist or I’ll show you how _warm_ the inside of the incinerator is.”

Damn. He can’t let her get inside, so he steps forward, using the moment of surprise to shove her and the cart backward, letting the door close. He can only hope no one is paying attention to this one camera. “Fine. What do you want?”

“You pretend to be useless in order to stay out of the arena,” she comments. “I wouldn’t have expected it of a human.”

Lance blinks. “What, intelligence?”

“Cowardice,” Vlath spits. “The Champion’s lust for blood was _infamous!_ ”

The Champion _was_ Shiro, right? What is she talking about?

Still, whatever strange impression she has of humans seemed to intimidate her before, so Lance probably shouldn’t cast doubt on it.

“Perhaps it isn’t cowardice,” Lance hisses, trying to sound sinister. “Perhaps I simply choose not to expend energy unnecessarily, when I can simply target the weak,” he adds, glancing deliberately at Vlath’s shoulder.

“If you think I am as weak as the Holt creature, you are sorely mistaken,” Vlath responds, pushing the cart aside.

“Holt?”

Vlath scoffs. “You are good at playing the weakling, Lance, but I saw the fury on your face when he touched you. You killed him, did you not?”

The _hell?_ Since when is irritation at being grabbed a motive for murder?

Lance is still grasping for a response to that when she picks up something from her cart—a broken shaft of solid metal, what is that doing in there—

 _Oh,_ Lance realizes as she hefts it with her uninjured arm, jagged point first, like a spear. Vlath the _Gouger_.

“Your blood will be delicious,” she says, and Lance has a moment to think _is she a freaking vampire_ before she’s thrusting the spear at him.

He dodges aside, and the tip catches on his orange uniform sleeve, ripping the fabric but thankfully missing his arm. She pulls the makeshift spear back, and Lance clasps the shaft in his hands and _shoves,_ ramming the blunt end into her shoulder. She growls, wrenching it free, and Lance glances around, looking for some kind of weapon; hopefully he can keep her distracted until Sam finishes—

The door slides open, Sam pushing the cart and looking completely normal. Vlath blinks in surprise, and Lance takes advantage of her moment of confusion to grab her cart and shove it at her, pushing her down the hall away from them.

As she straightens, lifting the spear again, Lance realizes that polearms are fairly throwable, and it looks like Vlath knows how. If he dodges, Sam might not have time to get out of the way…

A metallic hand closes around his shoulder. Across the room, Vlath is pinned to the wall by another drone.

“Prisoners DR4CU-74 and EX9YT-04 have demonstrated physical fitness. Revoking infirm status and transferring to arena immediately.”

Lance glances back at Sam as he’s being pulled away, and receives a miniscule nod. When they pass Vlath, she growls, “I’ll taste you in the arena, human.”

Welp.

Lance is going to die, but at least the plan worked.

 

_T – 12:27:57_

“If we didn’t have people on board, I’d say target the ship’s power regulation straight off—remove their capability to do _anything_ to Earth,” advises one specialist.

Shiro frowns.

“Well, we _do_ have people on board, so come up with something else that won’t compromise the life support system!” snaps another. The first opens his mouth, offended—

“Alright, calm down,” Shiro cuts in. “We’re looking at our options, and that’s one we can rule out now.”

“Can we?” asks a third strategist. She flinches as the others turn to look at her disbelievingly, and says, “Everyone up there is part of the USF, and committed to safeguarding the Earth. It might be a sacrifice we have to make.”

Shiro sighs. “I understand what you’re saying, but at the very least we can put it at the bottom of the list unless the situation gets much worse. Besides,” he adds, “our main hacker is the teenage daughter of one of our men on board, and she’s clearly willing to put his life above the USF, though I’m not sure about the Earth as a whole.”

Several of them glance surreptitiously at Pidge, who is bent over her computer and typing furiously. No one is sure when Commander Holt will contact them again, but Pidge insists that she’s going to be ready.

“So putting that aside for now,” Shiro continues, “would it be logical to try and lock them out of weapons controls?”

“Ideally yes,” says the single programmer Shiro stole for this strategy session, “but those probably wouldn’t be connected to the drones. Our team is good, Commander Holt is great, and I really can’t say what that girl can do… but to hack into something, you have to find a weakness, and that takes time we might not have.”

One of the other specialists frowns. “What _will_ the drones be connected to? What are they for?”

Everyone turns to look at Shiro.

“I don’t remember a lot of the last year,” he reminds them, “and even if I did, I doubt anyone told me how the computer system was set up.” Their faces fall. “But I think they used drones for most manual tasks, as well as to patrol corridors… and there were smaller ones for surveillance, like little floating triangles…”

Shiro does pretty well suppressing the flashback on his own, but the person snickering something about the Illuminati certainly doesn’t hurt his ability to focus on the present.

“Surveillance,” someone muses. “We could get into the cameras.”

“And if the small ones don’t have hands, they must be connected to doors, right?”

Shiro suddenly feels like an idiot. “Maybe the drones’ _software_ doesn’t have direct access to the weapons system, but I’m sure they could get to a terminal. All we have to do is have one escort Commander Holt there…”

By the look on everyone’s faces, they also think this should have been more obvious than it was.

“Shirogane!”

Oh no.

“What is going on in here!”

Principal Iverson’s awake. He marches toward them, face storming with anger.

Shiro takes a deep breath and reminds himself that Iverson is meant to intimidate _cadets_. “Sir, Commander Holt got in contact with us. He has a way to get access to the Galra ship’s systems, so we’re developing a strategy.”

“Why wasn’t I informed of this immediately?” Shiro opens his mouth to respond, but Iverson just keeps shouting. “Once again, you are not in command here! Your… hacking could seriously damage our negotiations with Sendak!”

Shiro goes cold. “You’re not seriously considering agreeing to his terms, are you?”

Iverson’s expression darkens further, into what Shiro recognizes as real anger. “That is _not_ how you speak to a superior officer, Shirogane. I will make the decision that is best for this planet, and you will _follow orders_.”

“I will not.”

Shiro barely recognizes his own voice, full of tightly contained anger. He wouldn’t quite believe the words had left his mouth if everyone else wasn’t staring at him, horrified.

“Excu—“

“I won’t follow orders that sacrifice myself, and three _in-training cadets,_ for no reason.” Iverson tries to interrupt, but Shiro is _done_ giving up control of himself. “I won’t follow orders from a commander I can’t trust, from one who values the life of one general and personal friend over those of countless others. I _can’t_ in good conscience follow a commander who keeps secrets from the ones he protects just to save face, and I won’t follow a commander who refuses to listen to the soldiers under his command even when they have experience _he doesn’t._ ”

Shiro takes a deep breath, already regretting his words. He’s just destroyed any credibility he gained by staying inside the rules, and now he won’t have _any_ influence over what happens, because he’ll be locked up for insubordination. What was he even expecting to accomplish with that speech? Iverson isn’t going to change, he’s just going to get angrier—

“Neither will I.”

It’s Pidge standing behind him, of course, because she seems to have some kind of vendetta against most of USF command, and Shiro wants to scream at her to be quiet, because she just got _out_ of a cell.

“You’ve blundered your way through this entire situation, covered up things that people had a right to know, and locked out all the people who could have actually contributed,” she continues. “This place was a madhouse after the general left. Shiro is the one who managed to actually bring it back to some sort of order, _and_ the closest thing we have to a Galra expert, and you’re completely dismissing his input!” Shiro thinks he should point out that he doesn’t actually remember very much about the Galra, but what she says next shocks him into silence. “I’d trust him to give orders much more than I would you.”

This is _definitely_ not what Shiro was expecting, she’s going to get them both arrested—

“Me too,” says Hunk. He rises to stand next to Pidge. “He’s actually trying to come up with a strategy instead of giving the Galra whatever they want and hoping they’ll go away.”

Oh god it’s _spreading_...

Iverson, red even past his dark skin, turns to the two soldiers at the door. “Arrest all three of them!”

Shiro swallows, already starting to chant _don’t fight back, don’t fight back,_ and trying to will his arm not to activate.

But the soldiers look at each other nervously and don’t move.

“What are you waiting for?” Iverson barks.

The soldiers look even more awkward, before one—Private Palmer—finally says, “They’re right. Shirogane is going to handle this better.”

A rumbling spreads across the room. Shiro and Iverson watch in horror as people move to stand next to Hunk and Pidge. Not all of them, but more than half, and none of the rest seem horrified. No one moves to support the principal.

“This is _mutiny!_ ” Iverson protests, furious.

No one is threatening him at all. It’s nothing like the abandon-the-captain-on-a-desert-island mutiny from stories. But he’s right.

Shiro didn’t ask for this, didn’t _want_ it, but… these people all just put a lot of trust in him, and he has to respect that.

He looks Iverson in the eye and says, “Yes. It is,” before turning his head and calling, “Everyone, get back to work!”

As those who got up filter quietly back to their stations, Iverson sputters. “You’re all going to _prison_ for this!”

The room is silent for a moment, and then someone says, not loudly but loud enough, “At least we’ll be alive.”

Iverson literally _growls_ before storming out. All the tension leaves Shiro’s body in a rush, and when someone else starts humming the Munchkin’s relevant song from the classic Wizard of Oz, it takes a great deal of self-control not to burst into hysterical laughter. He’s in charge of saving the _world._ If you add in the Voltron thing, maybe even the entire _universe._

Finally, he takes a deep breath and pulls himself together.

That’s when Sendak calls.

 

_T – 11:49:18_

“So be it,” says a voice.

 _Sendak’s_ voice.

Keith rears back, catching himself just before his head clangs against the ceiling of the vent.

On the other side of the grate, Sendak sighs.

The commander of the ship is _right there_. Keith has his dagger. If he’s fast enough, he can end this right now, before anyone gets hurt. This is his chance.

“Axus, prepare a landing party, one that is equipped to fight the Champion,” Sendak says. “And tell the Druids the negotiation with the humans has come to an end.”

“Yes, sir.”

Keith stops short, takes his hand off his dagger. He can almost hear Shiro scolding him. Sendak has officers, lieutenants who would keep right on going if he died, and Keith’s not going to get them all. What’s more, from the way those strange Galra were talking earlier, Sendak isn’t even the highest authority here. Honestly, he’s probably preferable to the unpredictable and _magical_ alternative.

But this is still a good chance for Keith to get some useful information. What he’s going to _do_ with it he has no idea, but knowledge is power, right?

There’s a hiss as a door slides shut.

“You will not succeed. Humanity will stop you,” says a voice. General Parisot’s voice.

Keith’s mind leaps into action. She’ll be an ally. If he can break her loose, maybe get her in contact with Earth, they can set up some kind of plan…

“Stop me?” Sendak says. “Humanity is _helping_ me.”

What?

“It has been millennia since a Voltron lion was captured!”

Oh. That.

“Thanks to you, I will be the Emperor’s most trusted deputy. I will see the whole universe bow to the might of the Galra.” Keith shifts forward to see them better. “I’ve been thinking of a way to thank you.”

“I want none of your thanks,” says Parisot. She’s cuffed to the wall, and her face is bruised, but she looks so regally distasteful that Keith feels like the only reason she isn’t spitting in Sendak’s face is because it would be uncivilized. He’s a little bit in awe.

“Oh?” wonders Sendak. “Then now that you’ve outlived your use to me, I see no reason to extend my offer of a painless death.”

He swings his glowing, purple arm, and Keith flails into motion. He has his dagger—Sendak is _right there—_ if he’s fast enough—

But by the time his hand reaches the hilt, it’s already too late.

Keith missed his chance, and someone got hurt.

He sits and stares, paralyzed, Parisot’s last scream echoing in his ears long after the pool of blood stops growing.

 

_T – 8:59:42_

Hunk puts down the phone. Stands. Makes his way over to Shiro.

He should be nervous right now. Sendak had seen Shiro in command and immediately realized that there wouldn’t be negotiation, and no one knows what his next move will be. Commander Holt and Lance haven’t yet checked in. Iverson is threatening them all with a prison sentence. Hunk should be terrified.

Anxiety is as familiar to him as his own shadow, but at some point in the last, ridiculous day, it’s been replaced by exhaustion.

“Something is happening,” he says simply.

“Is it good or bad?” Shiro asks.

Hunk shrugs. “First of all, one of the ships left.”

“That’s…” Shiro stops, and his eyes widen. “Is it the one Commander Holt is on?”

Hunk shakes his head. “Based on which transmissions he was piggybacking on, he was on Sendak’s ship, which showed up first. This is the second one.”

“Okay,” Shiro says. “So they came for a day, then left. What for?”

Hunk shows Shiro the pictures the telescope researchers sent him. “These… I don’t know, fighter jets? They came out of it before it left.”

Shiro looks at the tablet. “Those aren’t fighter jets, they—“

Hunk’s tablet chimes, showing a new message from the telescope, with the subject line reading: _Another ship._

Shiro taps the notification, and a new picture pops up. A ship, sharp-nosed with red markings and a red trail behind it.

“ _That’s_ a fighter jet,” Shiro says.

The body of the message reads: _Several of both types are approaching Earth._

Hunk watches Shiro’s face. In the moments before Shiro takes a deep breath and slides the confident mask back on, Hunk wakes up enough to be _very_ afraid.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is over 6000 words, guys! 
> 
> (For anyone who suspected/hoped Parisot wasn't dead before: Congratulations! Also, I'm so sorry.)
> 
> I'm really excited for season 3, but as of now I HAVE NOT WATCHED IT, so **please** do not spoil anything in the comments!


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lance is missing, the General's dead, and people should really tell Shiro important information.

_T – 5:46:32_

  
“Hello?”

Pidge spins toward the communicator. “Dad? You’re back!”

“Yes,” he confirms. Hunk, who like most of the people Shiro made take a shift sleeping looks much better than he did a few hours ago, catches their fearless leader’s eye and waves him over.

“Did the plan work?” Pidge asks eagerly.

Sam sighs. “Sort of,” he says. “The good news is, I did get into a drone.”

“That’s great,” says Shiro, taking the chair next to Hunk. “Why do I get the feeling that there’s bad news coming?”

“You always did have good instincts,” Dad says. “The bad news is that Lance got taken to the arena.”

“Oh, _no_ ,” says Hunk. Mentally, Pidge is employing much stronger language. If Shiro thought it was worth attacking his friend to keep him out of this arena, if whatever kind of hellhole it is lost him an arm, what is going to happen to Lance?

“Hopefully we can put our plan into action before he gets matched up,” Dad says.

“Right!” Pidge remembers, reaching over to the computer. “I’m sending you a virus that should take control over all the drones on the ship within a few minutes. You’ll just have to run it.”

“Okay!” Dad replies. “While it’s downloading, why don’t you tell me what’s been happening on your end?”

Shiro leans forward. “Well, to start with, your daughter staged a coup.”

Pidge yelps, “What!” while Dad says, “Really? I didn’t think leading was your thing, Katie.”

“It’s not,” she responds irritably. “Shiro’s telling it completely wrong. He’s the one who completely went off at Principal Iverson about how bad of a leader he is.”

“It was a really awesome speech,” Hunk adds. “Pidge’s was pretty cool too.”

Pidge shrugs. “I just suggested that Shiro would be better at leading, and everyone else agreed, because he _would_!”

“I agree,” Dad says, “but I hope you weren’t too harsh on poor Kent.”

Iverson has a first name? Well, obviously, but _Dad_ is on a first-name basis with him?

“He’s got a temper—and not just the one he uses to scare cadets into line—and making enemies is never a good idea.”

“Yeah, Dad, I know,” Pidge grumbles. Fortunately, there’s no video link, so he can’t see the way she’s smiling. She never thought she’d miss his cheesy advice, but here she is.

At the same time, it does rub her the wrong way—they had to get rid of Iverson, or the whole operation would have crashed and burned. It doesn’t count as making an enemy if he was already a huge thorn in their side, right?

“So Shiro, you’re in charge now? Shouldn’t you be off running the place instead of talking to little old me?” asks Dad.

Shiro sighs. “Well, you are our best way to get through this, and our best source of information, so…”

“Okay,” Dad says, clearly switching into work mode. “What do you need to know?”

“The ship that just came and went—what were they doing?”

“Ah,” says Dad, not sounding especially grave. “That. Shiro, do you remember the Druids? They must have been the ones to make your arm.”

Shiro frowns. “I… I recognize the name, but I don’t remember what they are.”

“Wait,” says Pidge. “Aren’t druids, like, magician-priests or something?”

“It’s something of a mistranslation,” Dad admits.

Hunk sighs in relief. “Thank goodness—magic on top of all this would be too much. So they’re just priests? Or, if they built Shiro’s arm too, are they scientists?”

Pidge wouldn’t personally expect those two things to mix well. Then again, stranger things have happened.

“No, the magician part is correct. It’s the religious connotations that seem wrong.”

Pidge groans. Now they have to fight _wizards_. And on top of that, what if all the cool stuff the Galra had—laser arms, artificial intelligences, faster than light travel—were actually just magic? Talk about a letdown.

“Are you sure it’s not just a ‘sufficiently advanced technology’ thing?” Pidge asks desperately. Hunk, her fellow tech geek, looks understanding. Even they’re cavemen compared to the Galra, it would be better than people just breaking the physical laws of the universe without explanation or possibility of replication.

“That’s definitely possible,” Dad says, and Pidge sighs in relief. “They do seem to use scientific and magical terms fairly interchangeably.”

Scientific terms…

“Dad, in that first transmission, you said something about a ‘Colmar experiment’…”

“Yeah,” acknowledges Dad. “I was able to intercept transmissions coming into and out of this ship for a few weeks before it came to Earth, but I didn’t want to get caught, so I wasn’t broadcasting yet. Then, I caught a request from the Druids to conduct a trial of a machine they call the Colmar here. So I did some digging, and realized I had to put out a warning.”

“What is it?” Shiro asks. Pidge winces in sympathy. Until now, their main concern (other than the giant advanced warship) has been the danger of Voltron in Galra hands. But if there’s another superweapon to worry about…

“I’m not sure,” Dad says. “The records I intercepted uses a lot of terms that I’m not familiar with, but from what I understood… Galra technology and magic run on a substance called quintessence, which apparently exists everywhere to some degree, but is a crucial component of living things, especially sentient ones.”

“And the Colmar… extracts it?” Pidge guesses. “No, that can’t be right,” she realizes, “They already run on it, the technology to get it wouldn’t still be in the experimental stage, unless it’s some kind of improvement…”

“You could call it an improvement,” Dad says. “The Colmar extracts the quintessence from entire planets.”

Hunk looks horrified. “And all the things living on those planets…”

“Die.”

They absorb the implications of that for a moment. Before, when Sendak had threatened to annihilate the planet, Shiro had said they would blow it up, which was horrific enough. But this… Pidge imagines ten billion people keeling over where they stood, all movement ceasing, plants shriveling and drying—a planet of corpses. She shuddered.

“If you knew this,” said Shiro, sounding equally horrified, “if you _knew_ that they were going to do this to Earth, why didn’t you say anything the last time?”

“I would have, but time was running out, and I thought I’d give you the hopeful news first,” Dad says. “And then I heard their ship was leaving, so it didn’t matter. They must have decided Earth wasn’t suitable for their experiment for some reason.”

“The paladins!” Shiro’s eyes are widening in realization. “Hunk and I overheard a conversation where they were telling Sendak to negotiate with human command to give up the paladins of Voltron.”

“There might be something different about us, or our… quint-whatever,” Hunk says.

“Something that would interfere with their results.”

“And now that Shiro’s in charge, and told Sendak to stick his threats where the sun don’t shine…”

“Did you really?” asks Dad, amused, while Shiro flushes.

“Pidge! I didn’t say anything like that.”

“Relax, it’s just a figure of speech.”

Shiro sighs. “Anyway, this makes sense,” he concludes. “Now that it’s too much of a hassle, they’ve decided to just… conduct the test somewhere else.”

It seems plausible, especially since the Galra have given the impression that humanity to them is just an unimportant fly that they’re trying to swat because it caught their attention. It’s not unbelievable that when Earth became too much effort, the Druids decided it wasn’t worth it.

Still… “Does anyone else feel like this is too good to be true?” Pidge asks.

“Yeah.” Hunk chews his lip, before his eyes abruptly widen. “Those things the ship left behind… what if _they’re_ a Colmar?”

Silence.

“I mean, they might not be,” Hunk says. “It was just a crazy idea. Don’t believe it just because I said it.”

But it makes sense, Pidge realizes. Sendak’s ship had captured one of the lions, which seemed important; it would be going back to wherever the Galra headquarters was once this was over with anyway. The Druids wouldn’t lose anything by being on this ship instead, and in the meanwhile…

“Even if they didn’t manage to get all of us off the planet,” Pidge says, “they can conduct a control experiment on some other planet with sentient species—they have a whole empire, right? And I’m sure someone’s curious about what kind of effect we’d have on it. And if they see Voltron as a threat…”

“Then this will kill us as well as anything else,” Shiro finishes ominously. Hunk audibly gulps.

“Well,” says Dad. “On a happier note, the program you sent just installed, and is sending video feed from the thousand-odd drones and droids on this ship. I suppose we know now what system we’re targeting next?”

 

_T – 4:03:29_

Sleeping does wonders for Hunk’s mental fortitude.

In this improved state, he can really see how much of an effect the change in leadership had on the base. Of course, there are the former insomniacs like him who are actually getting constructive work done now.

Then there’s the group of hackers, who look nothing less than excited. Apparently they’re learning a lot about the Galra ship’s code just by hacking it. In the middle of them is Pidge, chattering over the comms to her father but also with the rest of the programmers, who seem to have forgotten the fact that she’s a child in the face of her incredible intellect. Hunk knows how fascinating it is to bounce ideas off of her ridiculous brain and learn from the ripples, and that was back when her attention was largely elsewhere.

Looking out the window, Hunk sees a group of soldiers talking near several loaded ATVs, and his stomach clenches. Simulations had indicated that the Galra fighter would land somewhere in the desert—likely, the Galra had traced either the Lion, Shiro’s pod, or the origin of the Garrison’s communications—and so Shiro had assembled several teams to be ready to intercept whoever landed once a more exact location was pinpointed.

Shiro had seemed confident that with a decent amount of soldiers, they could take out the Galra landing party without issue, but Hunk couldn’t dismiss the feeling that it wouldn’t be so simple.

Sour mood reinforced, Hunk turns back to his own project, which doesn’t exactly lift his spirits. The unidentifiable ships had settled into orbit around the planet, disintegrating several (unmanned, thank God) probes that had apparently been in their way. Whoever was flying them didn’t seem to mind photographs, though, and so Hunk’s job was to examine them, along with any information the hackers could find, and try to learn _anything_ about how they worked.

Needless to say, it was slow going.

 _We could always just blow them up_ , Hunk thought to comfort himself, but it fell flat. Nobody had been putting any significant weapons in space since the Outer Space Treaty in 1967, at least not overtly. And anyway, the ships were in low enough orbit that a nuclear explosion would trigger an EMP—and while still preferable to the annihilation of the Earth, taking out a good chunk of the planet’s power was hardly the most comforting proposal.

He downloads the latest set of pictures from the ISS. (Hunk was collaborating directly with _real astronauts_. It was more than a little incredible.)

From a quick glance through the pictures, these aren’t going to be much more useful than the last set. Hunk checks over his shoulder, then switches screens.

There’s no point to it, really: the program will send both him and Pidge a notification if any of the humans they’re missing show up in the drones’ video feed. But there’s something comforting in watching it tick along, knowing that Lance will be found soon.

(It’s not that he doesn’t care about Keith or Parisot or any of the other soldiers. But worrying about Lance and Pidge, whoever’s currently in more trouble, has been so ingrained in Hunk over the last few months that it drowns out almost everything else.)

Wait.

Hunk pauses the flicking video feeds—the program will keep going—and scrolls back a few frames.

His first, disjointed thought, is that it’s no wonder the program didn’t recognize her face. Then the reality of what he’s seeing sinks in.

No. Nonononononononononononoholy _shit_ …

Hunk slams the laptop shut and makes a run for the bathroom.

Somehow, he makes it to the sink before he heaves up what feels like everything he’s eaten for days. Flashes of hot and cold race through him, and it takes everything he has to keep his knees from giving out; he clutches the cool white sink like a lifeline, like the mothers he needs right now.

Hunk should have been expecting this. Once Sendak realized that Shiro wouldn’t give him what they wanted, there was no reason for them to keep Parisot around. But… maybe he’s naïve, maybe some part of him hasn’t processed that the Galra are evil, but he hadn’t been ready to see her dead, much less…

There’s nothing left to come up, but Hunk can’t help but retch anyway.

This time, he gives in to the shaking in his limbs; after turning on the faucet, he sits on the ground and just… breathes. The rushing water helps to calm him a little, bringing him away from the memory of that screen and back to his own body, to the cool tile under his legs, the dangling strap of his bandanna, the unpleasant smell of the room and taste in his mouth—and the footsteps growing progressively closer.

Hunk scrambles to his feet, brain kicking back into gear. He can’t go blurting this out to anyone he sees; it could seriously damage morale, especially as a rumor, so it would be better to let Shiro make a more formal announcement. He spits once and mourns the lost chance to wash his mouth out.

By the time the door opens, Hunk is washing his hands and wearing the most neutral expression he can manage.

“Hey there,” says Private Jenkins, heading straight for the sinks.

“Hi,” says Hunk. As he dries his hands, Jenkins splashes some water on his face, then examines his uniform in the mirror, brushing out creases.

“Just slept a shift,” he explains, “not that it feels like enough.” Turning toward Hunk, he smiles—which seems odd compared to how grumpy he’d acted earlier. Maybe he just needed sleep? “Of course, it’s still better than before. Shiro’s really taking care of us little guys, right?”

“Uh,” says Hunk. “Yeah, he is. He’s a good leader.”

Jenkins’s smile falters. “Yeah, though he’s no General Parisot.” It occurs to Hunk that quite a few of the soldiers here were from the general’s personal team. And maybe that made them less loyal to Iverson and more expectant of a competent leader— but if they find out Shiro’s decision led to Parisot’s death, they might turn on him just as quickly.

Shiro _isn’t_ General Parisot, and that means he’s not going to hide information to safeguard his reputation. Soon after he knows, everyone else will, too.

Jenkins sighs and squares his shoulders. “But we work with what we’ve got, right? And this plan seems like it’s got a good chance of working.” He holds the door open. “Walk to the command center with me?”

“Yeah,” says Hunk, because talking about this is comforting. “Pidge is pretty sure she can get control over the whole ship, which means not only will it not destroy the Earth, but we’re going to get to study a ship capable of faster-than-light travel.”

Jenkins smiles again. “Wonder where they’re going to put it.”

Hunk’s stomach swoops.

“What?”

Jenkins looks over. “Oh, well, wherever it comes down, the local government’s going to be pretty nervous about it, right? Even if it’s technically on USF property—hey, maybe they’ll put it here in the desert and it’ll be like Area 51!”

“Maybe,” says Hunk, mind racing. “But we’ll need to talk to the government, right? And USF command. And they’ll want to speak to the officer in charge, and that’s….”

“Not supposed to be Shiro,” Jenkins realizes, and now his face is as grim as Hunk feels. “We need to go ask him what he’s planning to do.”

Maybe Shiro does have a plan for this, Hunk thinks. Hopes.

But judging by Shiro’s extremely brief deer-in-the-headlights look when they explain, he didn’t. “I’ll have to go talk to Iverson, ask him to negotiate for us,” he says.

Hunk bites his lip. “Are you sure that’s the best idea?” Shiro raises an eyebrow. “I mean, he seemed pretty angry when he stormed out. If we aren’t _really_ careful, he’s not going to do what he needs to, and reminding him by shoving the person who took command in his face probably won’t help.”

Shiro’s mouth tightens, and Hunk abruptly remembers that Shiro hadn’t exactly _taken_ command so much as Pidge and Hunk had dumped it on him. Shiro doesn’t _seem_ unhappy with them about this, but Hunk can’t help but feel a little guilty— _he_ certainly wouldn’t have wanted that kind of responsibility.

“I could talk to him,” says Jenkins. He looks vaguely pained, and Hunk supposes he understands; he wouldn’t exactly be happy if he had to volunteer to talk reason into Commander Iverson. Still, something about the expression rubs him the wrong way.

“He knows me, kind of, and he knows I’m very loyal to the general, so he knows I’m just trying to make sure everyone gets out of this alive.”

Hunk tries very hard to suppress a wince; he’s not sure if it works, but Jenkins and Shiro are looking at each other, so hopefully they don’t notice.

“…That would probably be best,” Shiro decides. “It might take a while, and we’ll want to be able to get our people back as soon as possible, so go talk to him right away.”

“Yes, sir!”

“You’ll need to be briefed on the size of the ship and so on—Hunk, take your laptop and do that on the way to Principal Iverson’s room.”

“Yes sir.”

Oh no. Hunk’s laptop will open to the drone feed from that room. Jenkins follows him to his desk, so Hunk picks the computer up and starts walking toward the exit before opening it, trying to figure out the most natural angle that still obscures the screen.

He’s not sure it works, but thankfully both for the plan and Hunk’s gastrointestinal integrity, the drone whose camera he’d been tapped into has moved away.

“Are those camera feeds?” Jenkins asks, catching up.

Hunk nods. “There’s a program scanning for any of our people up there—right now the only one we have contact with is Commander Holt, so…”

“That’s good,” Jenkins says, and his smile looks different now—more genuine, Hunk realizes, and red flags start to go off, because that means the others _weren’t_. “It’ll be good to know that everyone is okay. You were friends with the cadet flying that lion, right?”

“Yeah,” says Hunk. Knowing Lance is safe _will_ be a weight off his mind-- maybe Jenkins was just strained before. Maybe. “Lance was my roommate, and he was me and Pidge’s pilot.”

“That Pidge girl is a genius,” Jenkins observes. “You are too, actually.”

Hunk blushes. “Thanks.”

“And this Lance managed to fly an alien ship into space on his first attempt at the controls. You three must be the stars of the Garrison.”

He can’t help a snort at that. “I wish. We were the worst flight team out of all the first years.” At Jenkins’ raised eyebrow, he adds, “Don’t tell Lance I said this, but the real star was Keith.”

“Keith?” Jenkins asks.

“Yeah,” Hunk says, reminded that the two probably never met. “He stowed away on the lion—he was always doing crazy things like that, he got kicked out during first quarter for assaulting an officer and then spent months in the desert looking for Shiro and found the caves where the lion was hidden. But he’s an _incredible_ pilot. Probably even better than Shiro.”

“Wow.” Jenkins has that somewhat forced smile again, and Hunk starts to wonder if the guy maybe just has something against Shiro. Which is still not ideal, but if it’s just a personal problem that he’s actively trying to control, then maybe Hunk doesn’t need to worry too much about it. “So he’s the third cadet?”

“What?”

“Oh,” says Jenkins, and if Hunk wasn’t watching out of the corner of his eye, he’d have missed the brief darkening of the private’s face; as it is, he’s unable to identify it before Jenkins’s expression returns to casual interest. “Earlier, when they were talking about whether or not to hand over the paladins, Shiro said he wouldn’t endanger himself and three cadets. So that’s you and Lance, but a few of us were wondering who the third one was.”

Shiro was almost certainly talking about Pidge, Hunk knows. They’d lost contact with Keith before the lion vision came, but Pidge had taken them aside soon after they’d reached the Garrison and asked them, worried, if they’d seen it too. If Hunk had to guess the identity of the fifth paladin, it would be Keith. But he doesn’t _know_.

Hunk also doesn’t _know_ whether Jenkins is plotting something underhanded, doesn’t _know_ he’ll react badly to news of Parisot’s death, doesn’t _know_ lying is the right choice. But he needs to make one.

And he needs to protect Pidge.

“Yeah,” Hunk says. “He was talking about Keith.”

 

_T – 3:54:53_

_Speak of the devil and he shall appear_ has always been Keith’s least favorite phrase, because it’s infuriatingly accurate.

Case in point: it’s just occurred to him to wonder what cleans the ventilation ducts when a floating pyramid turns the corner.

He grabs his knife and lunges for the thing, even though it’s probably already too late, that circle in the front is definitely a camera, and green lights are coming to life around it—he should have been expecting this, the air is stale and processed but not dusty ~~and considering the glee with which the Galra kill there are surprisingly few bloodstains~~ — but maybe he can get it before it transmits—

“Hey, stop!”

After a moment, Keith does, because that is a friendly, human, _familiar_ voice.

“Pidge?” he asks, squinting at the little machine.

“Yeah, it’s me, and can I just say it’s a pleasure to see your dumb face in one piece?”

Keith smiles. “It’s good to hear your voice,” he answers, because the last god-knows-how-many hours have been the absolute worst of his life, all the loneliness and helpless worry of the year Shiro was missing compressed down to less than a day with added backaches and nightmare fuel mixed in. (And actual nightmares. At some point, after getting as far from the scene of the murder as possible, he’d practically passed out from exhaustion, and then quickly regretted it.)

“Wait,” he realizes suddenly. “Last I heard, you were locked up? Is that still a thing? And how’d you get access to a Galra robot?”

“Wow,” comes the response. “It just dawned on me how behind you are.”

“I guess you’ll have to catch me up, then,” Keith says. He goes to sit back and bangs his head on the top of the vent; Pidge laughs again.

“Do you want to go somewhere more comfortable first?” she asks.

“I think this is the most comfortable I’m going to get on an enemy ship. A few lumps on the head are better than—” _blood bubbling up his throat and choking his screams_ —“…getting caught,” he finishes, trying to shake the memory of a dream away, knowing his face must have changed and praying that Pidge won’t ask.

Thankfully, she seems too caught up in showing off to notice. “Well, good news—this little guy is just the tip of the iceberg. Every drone on the ship works for me now.”

“That’s…” really impressive, actually. “Wow.”

“Yes, I _am_ a genius, thanks for noticing,” she responds, sounding a little distracted. “Okay, the little guy’s gonna take you to an empty room, and I’ll have some of the hominid drones guard the door, okay?”

“Sounds good,” Keith says, and crawls after the robot as it drifts away. He can’t wait to hear how she managed all this— and how she talked Iverson into letting her, for that matter. Hopefully, she’ll have some information about how Shiro’s doing that she can pass on, though if she’s still in the Garrison, that seems unlikely.

Then again, maybe with Keith gone, they’ll have captured Shiro and interrogated him, maybe even now he’s strapped to a table unconscious while they pull his arm apart—or _conscious_ while they pick his mind apart, because there’s no time for trauma-based amnesia when aliens are attacking the earth, and this time Keith isn’t around to save him, or he’s too slow and too late or too _weak_ , and he just watches as Shiro screams—

He bites his lip, fixing his eyes on the warm green glow of the robot’s lights against the side of the vent. Somehow, the worst of the nightmares were the ones where Keith wasn’t the one dying. Maybe it was because even when he woke up, he couldn’t tell himself they weren’t real.

 _Of course they’re not real,_ he reminded himself. No matter how suspicious Keith was of the Garrison, he knew they wouldn’t resort to torture.

(Of course, that wasn’t why the dreams scared him.)

Keith is so lost in thought that it takes him a moment to notice that his hand has landed on empty air. Then he’s pitching headfirst through an opening in the vent and all he can think when he sees the ground rushing at his face is that this is a pretty logical continuation of the trajectory of his life so far.

Then his reflexes take over and he twists, landing in a crouch on his hands and feet.

“Wow,” says Pidge from the robot. “You’re like a cat.”

“You couldn’t have warned me?” he yelps. It’s supposed to be an irritated bark, but his voice cracks midway.

Pidge snickers. “Actually, I did, you were just spaced out.”

There’s a long and terrible pause and then the sound of her pulling in a breath.

_“No puns.”_

“Puns? I am _offended_ that you would suggest such a thing.” Keith almost decides she’s being serious when she adds, “I was about to engage in _wordplay_.”

“That’s not better,” he says, but admittedly both his irritation with her and his disgust for himself have faded somewhat. He stretches, looking around at the empty room Pidge found for him. It’s fairly bland: a desk and chair near one wall, the door on the other. There are no personal items or papers on the black metal desk, no decorations on the deep purple walls, and Keith wonders if the room is unused or if Galra are simply this spartan.

In any case, there’s nothing threatening or interesting here, so he turns back to the drone. “So what’s been happening on Earth?”

“Keith,” says someone that isn’t Pidge.

“Shiro!” Keith wonders what his face looks like; he tries to stay composed even as a knot of tension unties. “It’s good to hear your voice.”

(Understatement.)

“I’ve been so worried about you,” Shiro says. “How could you just up and stow away on the lion like that? We didn’t know where you were! I mean, it seemed like the kind of thing you would do, so we assumed you were somewhere up there, but… god, Keith.”

Keith feels like he’s been doused in cold water. Shiro’s voice sounds so _strained_ , like he’s been carrying the weight of the world, and it’s because of Keith’s bad decisions. “I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I didn’t mean for you to worry.”

Shiro sighs, and Keith’s shoulders curl. “I know, but just… please, think before you jump into dangerous situations.”

 _I did that and it got Parisot killed_ , he almost blurts. But he can’t bring himself to do it, not when Shiro’s already this disappointed in him. Anyway, it all comes down to Keith’s rotten judgement regardless.

Instead, he says, “I’ll try.”

“Thank you.”

Biting his lip, Keith looks for a subject change. “So what—wait, Shiro, are you in the Garrison?”

“Yeah,” says Shiro. “After the lion was found, and then the Galra captured it, we decided we had to work together.”

“I’m surprised Principal Iverson could swallow his pride enough to admit it,” Keith snorts. Maybe he’s just biased because the principal had very vocally spouted the party line about pilot error, but Keith’s never liked him very much.

There’s a long pause from the drone.

“Guys?” Keith asks.

“Well, he _was_ working with us, to some extent,” Shiro says, “until someone started a mutiny.”

“Wait, what?”

“You’re the one who ended up in charge,” Pidge protests. “ _And_ the one who called him out in front of the entire command center.”

Keith snorts. “And you lecture _me_ about keeping my head down?”

“That’s different,” Shiro protests. “Iverson’s attitude was putting people in danger.” Keith opens his mouth to protest that he usually had good reasons for jumping into things too, but Shiro cuts him off. “ _And_ there was no way that telling Iverson off would get me killed.”

Deflating, Keith says, “Well, neither of us got killed in the end, so…”

“I’m glad.”

(At least someone is.)

“Anything else happen down there?”

The subject change works, to some extent—Pidge and Shiro trade off, their commentary oddly relaxing, telling him about how Commander Holt is somewhere on this ship that Keith hasn’t managed to wander past yet (“I think I remember the vent shafts being smaller where they keep prisoners”), how they lost contact with Lance (“Of course as soon as one of you idiots gets found the other goes missing”), how they’d hatched a plan to take over the entire ship (“Apparently it’s going well, though I couldn’t tell you”), how the Galra had been looking for paladins and preparing some experimental magic superweapon, but might have given up on either or both—

“I heard about that!”

“From who?” Pidge asks. “Is there some kind of vent-dweller gossip club?”

Keith rolls his eyes. “Some of those Druids, and later… Sendak.”

Apparently the moment it takes Keith to choke the name past the lump of fear and self-loathing in his throat isn’t as suspicious as it felt. “Did they say anything helpful?”

Keith swallows nausea, tries to push his mind beyond gushing blood, back to the slightly-less-terrifying druids. “The druids… they mentioned casters that they’d chosen, and ships that Sendak prepared for them,” he recalls. “And they said they’d continue the experiment even without all the paladins, after they asked someone named… Haggar?”

“You can’t see it, but Shiro’s making a pretty nasty face right now, so I’m assuming this Haggar person is bad news.”

“Well,” Keith says, “she’s apparently not here, so we can worry about other bad news.”

“Like Sendak,” Pidge comments.

“Yeah,” Keith said. “And… his lieutenant, Axis or something? Sendak was telling him to prepare a landing party. I didn’t really get an impression of him, but if he’s someone Sendak trusts…”

This would be the perfect time to tell them about what happened to Parisot. But Keith remembers what Sendak had said— _Now that you’ve outlived your use to me_ — and he knows that Shiro won’t blame Keith, because he’ll be too busy blaming himself, worrying if Sendak decided to kill the other hostages too—and Lance is missing—

“The lieutenant knows I’m a paladin,” Pidge says suddenly. “I think it’s him, anyway—some Galra close to Sendak saw my face when they mentioned visions.”

“So they know all the paladins except for Keith and Hunk,” Shiro observes. “Maybe we can take advantage of that somehow?”

“If they weren’t willing to destroy the Earth anyway, we could use it to stall, say we were still looking,” Pidge suggests, “but I didn’t get the sense that paladins were special except maybe with that quintessence.”

“And they pilot the lions,” Keith points out, suddenly feeling like an idiot for not pointing this out earlier. “I—"

“Yeah!” Pidge says.

“Did you try flying the blue lion?” asks Shiro.

“Yeah, it didn’t work for me,” Keith says, “I think each of us has a specific color, but—”

“I guess that makes sense,” muses Pidge. “Five lions, five paladins. Too bad, though, since this whole thing happened because the Galra are afraid of Voltron…”

“I think Sendak has my lion on this ship,” Keith cuts in finally.

“Seriously?”

“You remember how I said I could feel some sort of pull with the blue one?” he asks. “It’s like that, and if I concentrate hard enough, I can see it.”

“It’s actually really odd that you could feel the blue one, if you can’t even fly it,” Pidge muses. “I mean, as far as I know none of the rest of us felt it—I certainly didn’t. Then again, we were all in classes during the times when we lived around here, and you were just out in your cabin for a while, so maybe any of us could have felt it if we’d had more free time? This whole psychic link and quintessence thing is an incredibly interesting line of research…”

As Pidge chatters on, Shiro asks, “If you can feel it pulling, why haven’t you gotten to it yet? The ship isn’t that big, right?”

“It’s not,” Keith sighs, “but the pull, it’s like a compass, not a map, and these vents aren’t very direct. I _think_ I’m on the right level of the ship at this point, but just finding shafts I could climb down was a mess.”

Shiro makes a sympathetic noise.

“If you need a map, I can probably pull one at this point,” Pidge comments.

“Can you find the lion?” Shiro asks.

“Yeah— I’ll use the radiation signature Hunk found, it should be much faster than with the faces, unless they’ve got thousands of sources. Hang tight.”

“So what do I do once I find it?” Keith perches on the desk to wait.

“Honestly?” Shiro responds. “Just cause trouble. If you can distract them enough that they don’t notice what our hackers are doing, that’s good enough.”

“What about the… Colmar? Maybe I can come to Earth and break it.”

“If we can take them over from the inside, that would be better,” Shiro tells him. “We’ll leave you for a last resort.”

“Why? Wouldn’t it be safer to just destroy them?”

“In the short term, yes,” Shiro answers. “But if we get out of this, humans will be a primitive race that hasn’t even sent anyone out of our star system spitting in the eye of the rulers of half the known universe.”

“They’re going to try and crush us,” Keith realizes, going cold. “This isn’t going to end until Earth is destroyed.”

“Or until the Galra are,” Shiro agrees. “We have to try and track down the other lions, find the resistance—overthrowing the Galra isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the only way humanity survives.”

“And Voltron—us five paladins—we’re the key to that.”

“Yes,” says Shiro. “But the Colmar is an incredibly powerful weapon too. If scientists here can use whatever breathing room we buy to study it, study quintessence, study every piece of alien technology we can possible salvage…”

“Maybe we can defend ourselves.”

“Speaking of the power of science,” Pidge cuts in, “I’ve found two lions, I guess the red one’s yours, Keith?”

Keith nods.

“I realized I have no way to give you a map, so Rover here is going to take you there.”

“Really? Rover?”

“It’s cute,” Shiro defends.

“And it needed a name,” Pidge adds. “I gave this one limited AI so you can ask it to do things for you without me babysitting.”

“AI?” says Keith, uneasy.

“Limited, I said, don’t worry,” Pidge dismisses. “He’s the level of, like… a dog.”

“Hence Rover,” Keith realizes.

“Yup. Alright, go get your lion,” she says, and Rover floats back up to the vent. Keith drags the chair out from behind the desk and clambers in. “Huh, maybe I should have named it Lassie.”

 

_T – 3:23:37_

From the first time he stepped into a simulator, Shiro loved flying.

It wasn’t about the freedom of the open air, or some kind of ethereal peace. He didn’t take to it instinctually “like a duck to water”: just like every other recruit, Shiro had crashed his first run, his first ten runs. (Keith hadn’t, but by the time _he_ stepped into a simulator, Shiro had already realized he was something special.)

Piloting was hard. He had to split his attention between dozens of sensors and gauges, calculate the risk of every tap on the thrusters and tilt of a wing. Peace and freedom were crushed under the pressure of the responsibility for the safety of his passengers, and instinctual reactions often had to be stifled in favor of careful calculation.

That first time, he’d fallen in love with the feeling of smallness, the way the strongest forces in the universe swirled around him like a hurricane, and the knowledge that with time and practice, he could take advantage of every one of those powerful forces to bring him exactly where he wanted to be.

Something about this—running a base, or maybe saving the world—felt just like that. Instead of sensors and passengers, he had the soldiers under his command; failing to control his instinctual response meant the destruction of morale, which would be every bit as disastrous as a collision. It was hard and stressful, and Shiro could tell he didn’t have enough experience. And just like with piloting, some part of him was in love.

This was made easier, of course, by the fact that everything was going well. They’d found Keith and Commander Holt and were on their way to finding Lance, Parisot, and the other USF soldiers, as well as a second Voltron lion; they’d figured out a good portion of the Galra’s plan of attack; and best of all, their own plan was on its way to completion.

From the other end of the room, Pidge whoops. Shiro walks over; people look up as he passes, in some cases nodding or even smiling in acknowledgement, and then get back to work.

“Shiro!” Pidge spins to face him, beaming. “We got into the flight computers!” The other comm techs look equally excited.

Shiro smiles. “That’s great, guys,” he says. “But remember, don’t let them know until we’ve disabled communications.”

“Yes, sir,” comes the chorus, of responses— Pidge gives him a clearly joking salute that makes Shiro suddenly miss Matt terribly.

He reminds himself that every moment gets them closer to bringing him home safe, and the thought is unusually buoying. Maybe because for once, it’s actually true.  
“I’m going to go make sure you all have somewhere to land our newest ship,” he tells them, and a cheer goes up among the group.

As Shiro leaves the room, the mood carries him forward like a wind in his sails, making every step feel light. Over the past year, he’s gone from pilot to prisoner to fugitive, and he’s finally at the helm again. There’s something so important about this feeling— not the power over others, but having control over his own actions. The Galra are still looming above them, but for the first time since he learned of their existence, Shiro doesn’t feel like a piece of debris batted around by forces beyond his control.

Winding his way through the halls, memories of his long time at the Garrison come flooding back. He’d first come here for a tour after his freshman year of high school, back when he was just another kid who thought space was cool. At first, it had been intimidating, but then they’d let them into the simulator room. Shiro glances in as he passes, and the memory hits like a freight train. Iverson had snorted as he’d staggered out of the pod, head still spinning with nausea and excitement, and called Shiro’s efforts pathetic before moving on to the next student. When Shiro had come back a year later, having graduated early and become the youngest ever student at the Garrison, Iverson hadn’t remembered him.

Throughout his time at the school, Shiro had somehow managed to win the hearts of most of his professors, despite—or perhaps because of—his awkward social skills and feelings of inadequacy. But the Principal had been a largely distant figure; Shiro rarely earned the energetic scoldings the man was infamous for, and thus rarely interacted with him at all. But he’d always been there, and in the back of his mind, Shiro had always been determined to prove him wrong. And he had.

As he turns the corner, he’s surprised to see Private Jenkins outside the door of the meeting room, though the man doesn’t seem surprised by Shiro’s appearance.

“Aren’t you supposed to be talking with Commander Iverson?”

“I did,” Jenkins says, smiling. Despite the initial impression of grumpiness he’d made, he seems to smile a lot, almost enough to make Shiro feel uncomfortable. “He and the cadet are inside working out the details, I’d just stepped out to go to the restroom.”

“Ah,” Shiro responds, trying not to show how silly he feels for coming when everything is going just fine. “Will it disturb them if I go in?”

“No,” shrugs Jenkins. “They’re not on the phone with anyone right now.” He gestures at the door.

Shiro nods, then steps forward, opening the door, mentally ticking another item off the list—he’ll head out with the soldiers after this and confront the Galra landing party, and then—

He has just enough time to see Iverson nod, and then there’s a sharp jab to his neck and nothing more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this took so long, everyone! College totally kicked my ass, I finished in this in the time created by stress-induced insomnia.
> 
> Also I'm sorry for no Lance but ye gods, it's over 7000 words.
> 
> EDIT: One more thing! I'm thinking about changing the summary for this story, since it was written back when I had very little idea where the story was going. That being said, I am really terrible at writing summaries. So in the comments, let me know what made you decide to read this fic, or why you're still reading it now that we're 40,000 words in.


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